Oral history interview with Fred and Lois Metz [with transcript and photograph], July 14, 1976.

Oral history interview with Fred and Lois Metz [with transcript and photograph], July 14, 1976.

FLAGSTAFF PUBLIC LIBRARY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Fred and Lois Metz
Interview number NAU.OH.28.74
Fred and Lois Metz, who were long-time residents of Flagstaff. Mr. Metz’s family moved to Flagstaff in 1905 and Mrs. Metz’s grandparents, Judge and Mrs. Perkins, were some of the original settlers in the Flagstaff area. Interview conducted by Kristine Prennace on July 14, 1976. Transcribed by Jardee Transcription, February 2000.
This is an interview with Mr. and Mrs. Fred Metz, who were long-time residents of Flagstaff. Mr. Metz's family moved to Flagstaff in 1905 and Mrs. Metz's grandparents, Judge and Mrs. Perkins, were some of the original settlers in the Flagstaff area. The interview is being conducted on July 14, 1976, at the Metzes' home, which is located at 109 Van Deren’s Avenue, in Sedona, by Kristine Prennace representing the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Mr. Metz, when and where were you born?
FRED METZ: I was born in Kilburn, Wisconsin, on June 10, 1899.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: And who were your parents?
FRED METZ: My parents, John Metz, and my mother's maiden name was Julia Hollverson.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Where did they come from originally?
FRED METZ: My father came from Germany. He came over with five brothers and sisters - three sisters, and he was one of two brothers - five children. Their father brought them from Germany, and they settled in Wisconsin, bought a BEAUTIFUL big farm there, right along the Wisconsin River. They left Germany so that the two younger boys wouldn't have to go into the service. You know, the kaiser conscripted all young men, so their father brought the whole family to Wisconsin, so the boys would NOT have to serve in the kaiser's army.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Your mother also came from Germany?
FRED METZ: She was from Norway. She's Norwegian, Hollverson. Her family lived there in Kilburn, Wisconsin.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: What did her father do?
FRED METZ: He was a farmer. That was all farming area around there. Very beautiful farm. There were a great many Germans and Norwegians in that area; and dairies and dairy cows and things like that - cheese factories.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Right. So when did they come to Flagstaff then?
FRED METZ: My mother and father moved to Flagstaff… It was so easy to remember, my father brought my mother from the east, due to my mother's health. She had consumption. We arrived in Flagstaff on the fifth day of May 1905 - the fifth day, the fifth month, and the fifth year, which is easy to remember, isn't it? Very fortunate.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: So you moved because of ...
FRED METZ: ... my mother's health. And she lived to be how many years, dear?
LOIS METZ: About seventy-six.
FRED METZ: About seventy-six, and she was supposed to die within a year!
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Now, what did your father do when he came to Flagstaff?
FRED METZ: When my father came to Flagstaff… in Kilburn, Wisconsin, he owned a small barber shop, and he came to Flagstaff as a barber with Mr. Frank Leslie, who owned the nicest barber shop in Flagstaff. My father worked for him about three years, and then engaged in the sheep business. His first partner in the sheep business enterprise was Leo Verkamp. He was with my father for many years. Now, my father acquired his sheep outfit, he and Mr. Verkamp, from a very, very nice gentleman by the name of....
LOIS METZ: I can't help you.
FRED METZ: Well, it begins with "H." He was the managing operator of the drilling enterprise that was being conducted at (
LOIS METZ: Meteor Crater.)
FRED METZ: Meteor Crater. He had these sheep on the side. Well, in the early days, he owned a stock company. He went east at regular periods when he ran out of money and was able to raise more money. He was a very good salesman and publicity man. He'd come then, back there to Meteor Crater where they were drilling.
LOIS METZ: Wasn’t his name Hollsinger?
FRED METZ: Hollsinger was his name - Mr. Hollsinger. And he kept the people in the East on pins and needles all the time, telling them that they were just about to hit the meteor that was supposed to have been buried. In fact, he'd even come with tales of how the drill had hit this material which was the hardest known substance in the world, and the drills would be shattered. But the fact is, there never WAS any meteor down in. The meteor exploded, and as a boy, when I was there with my father with the sheep, I picked fragments up as far away as fifteen miles from the site. It was just completely exploded. But he was a wonderful gentleman, and he was wantin' to move and retire to Pasadena with his family, so my father and Mr. Verkamp bought his sheep outfit.
Now, my father was in that area about three years with the sheep. Then he moved and he got range just south of where the present site of Rogers Lake is. And that was his headquarters for many years, until some of the larger sheep outfits and the larger cattle outfits finally drove all the small sheep and cattle ranchers off - just like the big chain groceries are doing to the small groceries today. So my father lost his range land there, and had to move to Stonemans Lake where he was for several years. And then they took that range land, because some of the bigger outfits that wanted it and acquired it. So he, like about twenty other sheepmen that one year, just sold out in disgust because they couldn't make it with this constant moving.
Now, my father's place there, south of Rogers Lake, I have a letter here from the United States Department of Agriculture, dated January 30, 1976, in reply to a letter that Mrs. Metz wrote.
LOIS METZ: In 1962. That note wasn't in the seventies.
FRED METZ: No, I beg your pardon, this letter is dated January 30, 1962, and that's in reply to a letter that Mrs. Metz wrote while we were still living in Flagstaff, about this mountain that's named after my father. Here's the letter. It says, "Mrs. Fred W. Metz, 1774 First Avenue, San Francisco, California. Dear Mrs. Metz, this is in reply to your letter of January 19, concerning Metz Mountain. This mountain is located in Section 11, Township 20 North, Range 5 East, which as you will recall is approximately three miles southeast of Rogers Lake. Metz Mountain is shown as such on our detailed maps and is a well-known landmark to all of us and to the public. LeBarron Hill is one-and-a-half miles south of Rogers Lake and three miles east of Metz Mountain. Mr. Roland Rowdy, former supervisor of the Coconino National Forest is now stationed in Washington, D.C. He will be returning to Flagstaff within two weeks to make an inspection of our work. We shall extend your greetings to him. Thanks for your letter and interest in the National Forest Program. Sincerely yours, J.A. Cravens, Forest Supervisor."
We wanted to establish where the mountain was. I knew but I have a large....
LOIS METZ: We saw some publicity from someplace, and I thought… I think it was apropos from LeBarron Hill. So I wrote and asked 'em about Metz Mountain. I said, "Has Mr. LeBarron taken our mountain?" (laughter) And it seems that he has a hill, too.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Mr. LeBarron is another one of those small sheep outfits that was forced to go out of business due to the confiscation of their grazing land.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: About how many sheep did your father run?
FRED METZ: About 3,500.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: And that was a very small herd at that time.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Between 3,500 and 4,000. There usually was about 1,500 to what they called a band. He had two separate bands of about 1,700-1,800 sheep each. That's about the size most of the small outfits were made up of.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Seems like a lot. How large were the LARGE outfits then?
FRED METZ: Well, as the larger outfits started buying up, they never had them in bands larger than that, but they would own several sheep outfits all over the area, you see, and they got all the choice grazing lands, through their influence with the Forest Service.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: So they might possibly own as many as 10,000?
FRED METZ: Oh, easy! Ten or fifteen thousand. It was the same way with the small cow outfits. That same year there were maybe fifteen small cow outfits went broke because their land was taken away from 'em for the big cattle outfits. It was a terrible thing to happen to the community, because when the town was patronized by all of these small independent sheep outfits, all these small independent cattle outfits, it was a lots better town than with one or two big outfits owning the whole thing, you see.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you tell me what your father did after he lost his sheep?
FRED METZ: After he lost his sheep, for a couple of years there was a Republican administration in the state here at that time. Thomas Campbell was governor, which was almost unheard of. This was Democratic for so many years. My father had all of Coconino County with the state game warden. He was appointed state game warden in Northern Arizona, and he had that position for a couple of years. Then after that he worked for the Flagstaff Lumber and Timber Company, which is over there where the Saginaw is now.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Where the Holiday Inn....
FRED METZ: No, no, the Holiday Inn was the Arizona Lumber and Timber Company. That's where I worked as a boy. I fired on the railroad there, just before World War I. The other one was over east of town. Originally, that mill was started by Mr. J.C. Dolan. He later was associated with Riordans in the Arizona Lumber and Timber. But the mill over there was the Flagstaff Lumber and Timber Company, and the nickname was the Flim Flam Company. (laughter)
KRISTINE PRENNACE: What did your mother do these years after you moved to Flagstaff?
FRED METZ: She was a homemaker.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: How many brothers and sisters did you have?
FRED METZ: I had one brother and one sister.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: What were their names?
FRED METZ: My brother's name was John Metz, who has since passed away. He lived in Prescott. My sister's name was Helen Metz. She married Mr. Jack Young. She had two children - both of them live in Flagstaff. John Young has an insurance business out on Cedar, Farmers Insurance. My niece, my sister's daughter, is Cathy Spangler. Both she and her husband are schoolteachers in the Flagstaff area. Mrs. Spangler, my niece, has two lovely daughters and a son. My nephew, Johnny Young, has three delightful daughters. Johnny Young's wife was the former Mary Todd of the famous Todds Lodge up here in Oak Creek, which is now Garlands. The Todds started that in the early days. That's one of the most famous and the nicest places to stay in Arizona in the summertime. Mary Young, I think, was the second daughter, and my nephew John married her. We had them all here last Sunday with the girls for an outing - a delightful time.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Okay, why don't I ask Mrs. Metz now about her family background? When and where were you born?
LOIS METZ: I was born in Kansas City, Missouri. And you know I didn't live there very long, or I'd call it "Missourah." (laughter) And I was born January 31, 1902.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Who were your parents?
LOIS METZ: My father was Fred H. Perkins. He was Judge Perkins' oldest son. My mother was Inez Philly. Her father was city engineer about that time for Kansas City.
FRED METZ: Tell her what he later did.
LOIS METZ: Well, he did that first.
FRED METZ: Oh, first, _________.
LOIS METZ: He was an engineer, and he was the engineer in charge of the first railroad that was built to Laredo, the city in Mexico. My mother was a babe in arms when this project started, and they lived along the railroad as it was built, and my mother learned to speak Spanish before she did English, because of the household help they had, their nursemaid and so forth. I think she must have been six or seven when they moved back to the States for a short while and then went back again. My grandfather spent a good deal of his time in Mexico. He built the Guanajuato Farm Electric Company in Guanajuato. And I can't spell Guanajuato, in case you need to know. (laughter)
KRISTINE PRENNACE: That's what I was going to ask! Well, we'll find out.
LOIS METZ: And MY family came to Arizona, my father was a mining engineer. My grandfather - there were four children of us at the time we were living in Oregon - and my grandfather lured my father down to Arizona to help out with the sheep business. He also had a small sheep outfit on the side of his law practice and being judge and so forth. Mother was very tired of raising her family all by herself, so she sort of chimed in and encouraged him to come down. My father bought a ranch down in the Salt River Valley, where Grandfather could come and headquarter for his sheep in the wintertime. We lived on this ranch, oh, eight or nine years, I think. But we came to Flagstaff first, and it must have been about 1908. We lived there a year or eighteen months or something like that before the family moved to Peoria.
FRED METZ: Tell 'em about what's there in Peoria, where the ranch was.
LOIS METZ: Oh, where our ranch house was, is where the buildings are for the Glendale Airport. The ranch itself was 160 acres there, and probably all of that's in the airport now. I was so surprised when we drove down Olive Avenue. That didn’t used to be Olive Avenue - they had it named for a lateral, and I can't remember what the lateral name was. Most of those streets in the outskirts in the valley were named for the laterals. The roads came down the canals and the small size canals that came off of the big canals were called laterals. So most of those streets were named for laterals, and now they all have names of their own.
FRED METZ: Lateral 34 or Lateral 82, that was the street, instead of the names.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: So you were what… about six or seven when you came here?
LOIS METZ: Yeah. I went to school here. I started to school in Williams. The headquarters for Grandfather's sheep outfit was out of Williams, and his YOUNGEST son ran the sheep. He was Warren Perkins. At first we settled in Williams for a short time, and I started to school in Williams, in the second grade. And then they decided that it would be better for us to move up to Flagstaff, because my father was gone so much, it would be nice for Mother to be closer to Grandfather. Shortly after we got to Flagstaff, I came down with measles, and pretty soon everybody in Flagstaff had the measles because they'd been having it in Williams. I transported them from Williams to Flagstaff.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Now, where did your grandfather live? Do you remember what street he lived on or anything in Flagstaff?
LOIS METZ: Yes. At first he lived in the old Gosney house, which is still there. It's been done over several times. I'm trying to think, the Stalls owned it and lived in it for many years. He was the man down at the railroad.
FRED METZ: He was the agent for the Santa Fe.
LOIS METZ: I'm not familiar enough with the streets. It was on the corner of Birch and the one that's west of Sitgreaves.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Humphrey?
LOIS METZ: No, Humphrey is the other way.
FRED METZ: Humphrey is east.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Okay, Park might be the name of it?
LOIS METZ: It COULD be. I'm just not familiar enough with the streets. So-and-So's house was the way we always designated it in those days. And then they lived up on the hill next to the Pollock home for a number of years. Eventually, they lived over on Agassiz.
FRED METZ: First they lived right there. Isn't that where the five-and-ten-cent store is now?
LOIS METZ: Yeah, they lived in the old Sisson house, that's right.
FRED METZ: That was next to the old Arizona Central Bank.
LOIS METZ: The old Sisson house is where the Firestone store is right now. The Arizona Central Bank was right on the corner. And that's where they were living when I came to Flagstaff to go to the Normal School. And I lived downtown with them, I didn't stay at the dormitory.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Okay, maybe we can move into talking about your schooling, both of you. I think we'll do it that way. I don't care who starts. You went to Emerson?
LOIS METZ: I just went to Emerson this one year before my family… after having brought the measles, then my family moved to Peoria. I went to school down there in Peoria in a one-room school. I even remember the teacher's name. Her name was Mrs. Rambeau. Oh, there must have been maybe twenty-five or thirty pupils in the school, all grades.
FRED METZ: In one room.
LOIS METZ: Yeah. And when I went there, I guess I was in the second grade, or maybe I was in the third by that time. Whatever grade it was, they didn't have it, so they put me in the one behind it. They put me back in the second grade. And then the next year, they had a third grade, but in the meantime, I'd been listening to everything else, and I didn't need the third-grade work, so they moved me on up into the fourth grade. I got through with everybody else, even if I'd been put back one year.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Yeah, I imagine there's a lot of flexibility.
LOIS METZ: Yes. And eventually I graduated from that grammar school. By then, there were two rooms, and there were nine of us in my graduating class. To kind of brag a little, I was valedictorian. (laughter) Then the following year was the year that I came up to the Normal School, because there was no high school. And at that time, the Normal School gave high school work. Everybody in Northern Arizona, where there were no high schools, came to the Normal School and got their high school training.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Okay, we'll go back to YOUR grammar school education.
FRED METZ: Well, now, my first school experience, I went to the Nativity School for two years. Do you know where that health food store is now, right across from the Cath… That was the old school. When they built the new church over there, they moved it across the street. But that was the old schoolhouse. So I was two years there, and then I went to the Emerson School. My folks bought the property directly across the street from Emerson School on Aspen. I completed my schooling there, was in my second year - that's the eighth grade - was in my second year at the Normal School, when World War I broke out, and I went away to the service then. (tape turned off and on)
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Why don't we go back to Emerson? Do you remember any of your schoolteachers there?
FRED METZ: Oh, yes!
LOIS METZ: Miss Green.
FRED METZ: Miss Green. We both had Miss Green. She was later Mrs. Paul Coffin, from the Wilson and Coffin Plumbing Company. Such a wonderful, wonderful lady. Then later, we had two or three other teachers, but none of them impressed me as much as Miss Green did. Then the main one was one I had for a couple of years, and one who was my teacher when I graduated, and her name was Mrs. Bertha Kennedy. And here she is with these big wheels on page 22 with Mrs. Al Doyle. They were neighbors, you see. And she's on page 22 of Flagstaff 1876-1976. Bertha Kennedy had a daughter and a son, Johnny Kennedy. I lost track of them over the years. But Bertha Kennedy was a marvelous teacher.
LOIS METZ: She was the principal of the school.
FRED METZ: Principal of the school later, and everybody loved her. She just was....
KRISTINE PRENNACE: She was married at the time that you had her?
FRED METZ: No, she was a widow.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: So that was how she kind of qualified, because there weren't very many married teachers.
FRED METZ: No, she was a widow.
LOIS METZ: If you were married, you were automatically OUT!
FRED METZ: Yeah, she was a widow, and a great friend of Mrs. Al Doyle's. Of course they were neighbors. The Kennedy house was the first house south of.... I've got it right here. Here's the Greenlaw house and then the Bertha Kennedy home. The first house south of the Greenlaw home was Bertha Kennedy's home.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: What street was that on?, if you can remember that.
FRED METZ: That's looking south on Leroux Street in 1913.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: It must have been like from the top of it.
FRED METZ: They're up at the top, yeah, and they're looking south. There's the Weatherford Hotel down there below. Here's Bertha Kennedy - I marked it on there - Bertha Kennedy's home.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you have any classmates that you remember particularly well?
FRED METZ: Yes. In our graduating class there was Albert Santalianas, the only Mexican boy, who was without question one of the most brilliant young men I ever knew when it came to figures. He could go up to the blackboard, and they could call like "5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12," give him ten figures across that way, and a line of twelve different figures, draw a line and write the answer. Just as soon as he drew the line, he could write the answer.
LOIS METZ: Early-day computer! (laughter)
FRED METZ: Ella Hoffman was another classmate, of the Hoffman family. Minnie Benson. Sarah Herman, whose father and mother ran one of Flagstaff's first and nicest clothing stores, dry goods store. There was also Elmer Jackson, a close friend of mine. There was Gaston Aubineau, A U B I N E A U. His father was mayor of Flagstaff in 1898. There was Lucille Elmore, who was the beauty of the time, had the most GORGEOUS hair. She had braids that hung down her head to her knees in back. She had two braids, and each braid was at least three inches in diameter. You never saw such a one - she was a BEAUTIFUL girl. Oh, yes! my good friend Ralph McGoogin, who lived right at the underpass. (tape turned off and on)
LOIS METZ: Was Ralph Elliott in that?
FRED METZ: No, no.
LOIS METZ: He came later?
FRED METZ: He came later. And I think that's what constituted the graduating class of that year. I forgot what year that was.
[END TAPE 1, SIDE 1; BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE 2]
FRED METZ: _________ and went to the office to get paid. And the old office still stands there, right across from the Holiday Inn, that tufastone building. In those days, there was no such thing as currency. You got paid in gold and silver. Nobody had any currency in this country. And I can remember going in there and getting two bright, shiny twenty-dollar gold pieces and a couple of five-dollar gold pieces. And it was really an experience to carry THAT kind of money around. There was only silver and gold, there was no paper money.
LOIS METZ: And certainly no checks.
FRED METZ: No checks a'tall. Well, then the next summer I went up and enrolled up at the Northern Arizona Normal School. That summer I again worked out at the lumber company, but I worked on the railroad, the logging road - I was fireman on the engine. Then I put in another summer like that, and then we went into World War I, the country, and I enlisted in the Navy, was sent to San Diego, California, where I went through the boot camp, as they called it. I went into the Signal Corps and I was transferred from there, after about four months, to Norfolk, Virginia, where I completed school, quite an intensive training. I was put into the submarine service and shipped up to New London, Connecticut, and was getting accustomed to submarine life, and learning something about the signal end of it, particularly aboard a submarine, when the war ended. I was kept around there for about another thirty days without going to sea. The war was over, they held all of the ships in, and the boats. I was discharged then, and came back to Flagstaff.
Jobs were very scarce. I was able, through the influence of Mr. C.B. Wilson, Sr., who Lois' grandfather had brought out to be his law partner in the early days, he was also the attorney for the Santa Fe Railroad. I got a job up at the Grand Canyon with the Fred Harvey people, driving their touring cars. They used the great big old Pearce-Arrow seven-passenger cars with the headlights out on the fenders. I was up there for about a year-and-a-half. That's where I was really able to save some money. I made a hundred dollars a month and my board and room, and up there, no place to spend a dime, so I saved it all. I sent my check down to Flagstaff to the bank. After about eighteen months of that, I had a nice little nest egg, and I decided I wanted to continue my education, and I moved to Phoenix and enrolled in the Lamson Business College. I spent a year-and-a-half there, graduated, was married the day after I was graduated, moved to Flagstaff the next day, was hired by Babbitt Brothers as assistant cashier to Mr. Jakle, Mr. Jakle, Sr.
I was there for about a year-and-a-half, and a friend of my father's was elected county recorder, Howard Marine. He asked me to be his deputy. I was his deputy recorder for about a year-and-a-half, and I tired of that, I couldn't see any future in politics. So I put in my application with the Standard Oil Company in California and was accepted. They brought me back to Phoenix, and I went through the stations there, as a trainee. I was moved to Tucson - Mrs. Metz and I moved to Tucson. After working on a station there for six months, I was put in charge of all the Standard Oil service stations IN Tucson, which at that time they were run by the company, numbered about six stations. So I was there with them for several years.
Mr. John H. Cameron of the Cameron Oil Company, Ardmore, Oklahoma, used to spend his winters there in the Santa Rita Hotel. He'd walk over and visit with me, and he finally propositioned me once to go to Oklahoma with him. He had about twelve service stations across Oklahoma, but they didn't know anything about giving service. He wanted his stations all remodeled and run like the Standard Oil's. So I decided to go with him.
I resigned, he asked me to go up to Flagstaff and see my parents, Lois and I… and then come back within about a week and we'd go to Oklahoma then with he and his wife. He had his chauffeur and a big Cadillac car and wanted us to ride over with him and ship our household things. While we were in Flagstaff visiting my people, I got a telephone call one evening. Mrs. Cameron was calling me from the Santa Rita Hotel in Tucson. He had dropped dead in the lobby of a heart attack. So that was the termination of my employment with him.
So then I came around Flagstaff for a while, then I moved down to Phoenix and I went to work for the water users, Salt River Valley Water Users, as a clerk in the accounting department. I was there about a year-and-a-half, and I went over to the City Hall in Phoenix. I worked there as clerk and assistant chief clerk for two years, and was made chief clerk. Then I realized that that was again politics, and I wanted none of it.
LOIS METZ: He was chief clerk in the water department.
FRED METZ: Yeah, I was chief clerk in the water department in Phoenix. So finally I put in my application with National Cash Register Company and was accepted. I wanted sales, but before you could go into sales, you had to have a year-and-a-half in their office. I went in as assistant office manager, and in about eight months I was made office manager. At the end of eighteen months I was accepted into the sales organization, sent back to the factory at Dayton for some special training. The result was I spent thirty-five years with the National Cash Register Company. I spent ten of it up around Flagstaff. I was given that territory. I had everything in the state north of Wickenburg. I headquartered at Flagstaff, 'cause we knew everybody.
World War II broke out, and the company let over half of the salesmen go. They had around 1,900 salesmen, and they kept 800 of us. I was one of the fortunate ones, and I was sent to San Francisco, where we lived for almost twenty-five years. I had a couple of very severe heart attacks, and had to take early retirement. And in 1963, we moved here to Sedona, and have lived in this little house ever since June 10, my birthday, 1963. And here we are.
One of the things we moved here for is close proximity to what remaining relatives we had in Flagstaff. We have two nephews and their families here in Sedona - two sons of Lois' sister. It felt more like home, plus I always considered this the finest area in the United States. After we first retired, we spent three years traveling all over the United States, trying to make up our mind where we would settle. We knew that San Francisco was no place to retire, so we decided on Sedona, and we moved here, and we've been here ever since, and don't plan to leave - we WOULDN'T leave. We have many friends here. Of course we have a very, very few of our old-time friends in Flagstaff - they're very few and far between. We do still have some family there, which is nice to go and see. We go up every Friday to do our shopping, and we have lunch either with one or the other. We take our lunch with us and have it at their house.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Who are some of your friends who are still living in Flagstaff, that you knew years ago?
FRED METZ: Yes. Well, Mr. and Mrs. Pat Hogan, Ernest Pat Hogan, whose father was one of the old, old pioneers of Flagstaff, Dan Hogan. He was one of Teddy Roosevelt's original Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War. Of the old-time Flagstaff people that are left, there's Howard Yost, who was in the post office for many years. And there's his sister, Mrs. George Falder, FALDER. The Falder family were great friends of my mother and father. There's Orinn Compton, who lives in Sun City a bigger part of the time, still maintains a home there.
LOIS METZ: The two Greenlaw girls.
FRED METZ: Two Greenlaw girls.
LOIS METZ: Mrs. Beamer and ...
FRED METZ: ... Mrs. Drain. And there's Tommy Long. He's one of the early - not back as far as Mrs. Beamer and Mrs. Drain. Do you know of any others, honey?
LOIS METZ: I'm thinking.
FRED METZ: Of course Henry Giclas. He and his dear wife are very good friends, but they're almost as old as we are, not quite. But they're a very, very wonderful couple. There's a FEW old-timers left....
LOIS METZ: There aren't all that many left in Flagstaff. Lots of them in Cottonwood. A few of us in Sedona.
FRED METZ: The really old, old, old-timers, not too many of us. So many of 'em all passed away. Pretty near ALL of my classmates are passed away - my graduation from Emerson School - except Minnie Benson. And I think Sarah Herman, who lives over in Los Angeles. Ralph McGoogin still is alive. He lives in Long Beach. I've lost track of Albert Santalianas, who I would love to know where he is. But so many of them are gone.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Well, let's ask Mrs. Metz, when did you start going to Normal School?
LOIS METZ: It had to be in 1915.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you meet Mr. Metz those years?
LOIS METZ: That year. We were in two classes together.
FRED METZ: (inaudible)
LOIS METZ: (chuckles) We were in algebra class, and we were seated alphabetically. His name was Metz, and mine was Perkins, and there was somebody between us.
FRED METZ: Morris.
LOIS METZ: Morris. And he wasn't there very much.
FRED METZ: L. Morris.
LOIS METZ: Elmer Morris. And then we were in - they had a spelling class, and we were in spelling class together. That was how we met, when we were seated more or less side-by-side, and we were never formally introduced, of course.
FRED METZ: Didn't need it, did we?
LOIS METZ: No, not from then. You just said hi to whoever sat beside you.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: How did a young man go about asking a lady out in those days?
LOIS METZ: Well, now, let me think. He was going with somebody else for a good deal of that year. I'm not sure I could remember. I think the first actual date that we had, though, we went to the movies.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: At the Orpheum?
FRED METZ: Uh-huh, at the Orpheum.
LOIS METZ: Yeah. And that was the year that they had that terrific snow, and the Orpheum caved in. I went back to Phoenix - we always went back and forth by train in those days - and I went back to Phoenix for the Christmas vacation. And when I came back, the snow was there, and I can remember I came a day early or a day late, whichever. My grandparents weren't expecting me, so I wasn't met. And they had cleared the paths on the sidewalks just wide enough for an individual to walk. I had my suitcase, and I remember I had to carry it out in front of me like this. I couldn't carry it down to the side. I didn't have very far to walk, just up to where my grandparents lived there, at the Firestone store.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Right.
LOIS METZ: So I remember there were a number of things going on over at the school. And since both of us lived downtown, he'd say, "Well, can I pick you up, and we'll go to thus-and-so, or whatever?" So we walked over. Of course everybody walked everywhere.
FRED METZ: In December they had sixty-six and three-tenths inches of snowfall.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: In one month!
FRED METZ: And then in January, on top of it, they had fifty-four point four.
LOIS METZ: Yeah, that was a very snowy year. You had to wait until the trail was broken on some of those mornings to walk over to the college, over to the Normal School.
FRED METZ: There was a total of 120.7 inches.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: They had to clear the roads by hand?
FRED METZ: By hand. You see the men working there?
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Yeah.
FRED METZ: And I worked in that crowd as a boy, 'cause there was no school and they paid us twenty-five cents an hour to shovel snow.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh, they did pay you?
FRED METZ: Yeah, twenty-five cents an hour. Worked ten hours and made $2.50.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: That was a little bit more money than it is today.
LOIS METZ: Yeah, that actually WAS $2.50.
FRED METZ: That WAS money!
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Okay, did you finish high school at the Normal School?
LOIS METZ: No, I didn't, I only went that one year, and then I went to school in Glendale for one year. There was a high school in Glendale. I had a horse and buggy, I drove myself. It was about five or six miles, and I drove to school with a horse and buggy. Then the following year, my family moved to Phoenix. I graduated from high school in Phoenix, at Phoenix Union, when it was the only high school in Phoenix. I graduated in 1920. When he came down to go to Lamson Business School, we picked up where we left off, and we decided then that we'd be married, as he said. The day after he graduated we were married.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Was that 1921?
LOIS METZ: That was 1922.
FRED METZ: We've now been married fifty-four years the first day of June. That's a long time.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: It sure is. Especially anymore.
FRED METZ: Yeah, most people don't reach that.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you know Dr. Blome?
FRED METZ: Oh, personally. Wonderful gentleman. The thing that’s so sad about Dr. Blome, with his great ability, when the war broke out, because his name was Blome and he was German. There were many people in Flagstaff who, of course, immediately thought he was a German sympathizer, which he was not. But there was a couple of men on the school board who just couldn't rest until they forced his resignation. He moved to Pasadena and died of a broken heart in about eighteen months. He was one of the most scholarly men, one of the finest administrators. It was a sad thing for the school when he was forced....
LOIS METZ: In that First World War, there was so much bitterness _____ toward the Germans. Of course Fred and I were friends, and I hesitated to say my friend's name is Mr. Metz, because the feeling WAS so intense.
FRED METZ: Oh, it was terrible!
LOIS METZ: I know that the antagonism wasn't nearly as noticeable in the Second World War as it was in the First, although they weren't friends, by any means. But there wasn't this bitterness, to where they changed the name of hamburger to "liberty steak," and a few things like that. All of those are ridiculous.
FRED METZ: Yeah! And they changed the name of German fried potatoes to cottage fried potatoes. Isn't that ridiculous?!
LOIS METZ: Considering how many people of German background there are in this century, it’s silly.
FRED METZ: Flagstaff had many German people. The old-timers, Minnie Michelbach, Yost, Metz.
LOIS METZ: Hochderffer.
FRED METZ: Hockderffers. A LOT of good German people there, but they were staunch Americans. The reason I never learned to speak German, when my father's father brought them over from Germany, he wouldn't let them speak German around the house anymore. He wanted them to be Americanized, and made everybody learn to speak English, and my father continued the same thing. He would never speak German to my mother or around the house.
LOIS METZ: And incidentally, he learned, with virtually no accent.
FRED METZ: No accent.
LOIS METZ: No accent. And he was in his early teens when he learned English.
FRED METZ: He was about fourteen when they brought him over, and they usually had to go in the service about fourteen over there.
So it was a sad, sad affair. Now, Dr. Blome had two nice children. His son was Harold Blome.
LOIS METZ: No, his son was Jack Blome.
FRED METZ: Jack was a nickname. The daughter's name was....
LOIS METZ: Nora.
FRED METZ: Both of them DELIGHTFUL people. Mrs. Blome was one of the sweetest persons you ever knew. And to have that type of a thing happen to such a lovely family was a sad, sad thing. Flagstaff lost the finest educator that it ever had.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Now, who took his place then?
LOIS METZ: I wasn't there, I can't tell you.
FRED METZ: I'll think of it in a minute. He was from Winslow.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: It wasn’t Gammage, was it?
FRED METZ: No, Gammage was after. THERE was a wonderful gentleman. Mr. Gammage was.... His name began with "P," the man that came up from Winslow. He was only a very short time. That era, at that time, there was a great deal of politics involved in school administration. They'd appoint a school board up there, and the board… what did they call them in those days? What they still call 'em. It's not a board.
LOIS METZ: Board of Regents?
FRED METZ: Board of Regents. They'd appoint a Board of Regents, and all kinds of heckling and trouble brewing constantly. I know one or two instances, particularly with Dr. Blome, two brothers attending the school were so obnoxious in everything they were doing, and he finally just told them they couldn't come back to school any longer, and their father was on the Board of Regents, and that helped in his dismissal, you see. Personalities like that. Both the boys should have been taken out and hung, as far as their desirability as students.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Do you remember the Normal School library?
FRED METZ: Very much! That's where our romance blossomed. It was in the two towers of Old Main. Both towers were kind of connected between. That's where the library was. Isn’t that right? And that's where we used to go on the pretense of looking up something, and got a chance to visit a little more.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you have to do a lot of research for your schoolwork then?
FRED METZ: Yes, quite a bit.
LOIS METZ: Well, actually, there wasn't all that much in high school.
FRED METZ: No, there wasn't, but they gave us some to familiarize us with what to do, you know.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Uh-huh. Was it a large library then?
LOIS METZ: Comparatively, no. I can't remember, there was that big area, the two towers and in between. And then I think there was one room around....
FRED METZ: On the west wall that ran down quite a ways.
LOIS METZ: But I wasn't all that interested in libraries. At that time, I didn't realize that fifty-five years later I'd be asked about it! (laughter) I wasn't paying all that much attention!
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Okay. Were there any special activities at the Normal School that you can remember real well, like a celebration, or I don't know, just anything outside of classwork?
FRED METZ: Well, the only thing was the basketball team and the football team and the baseball team. That was the activities. That's the only three. I played baseball. In those days, when the girls wore the bloomers, you know. The football team, I forget what year it was. I guess it was '16. They were the champions of the state.
LOIS METZ: And practically every boy in school at that time was on the football team, because there weren't all that many _________. (laughter)
FRED METZ: In those days, you see, we kinda had it to ourselves. There was an average, say, of 150-200 girls goin' to school, and only 50 boys, because no boys were taking training as teachers in those days - none of them.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh, right!
FRED METZ: So we became very arrogant with what we had to pick from, 150 girls. That's about three girls for every boy. I can remember at the dances, many of the girls had to dance with each other, because there were not enough boys to go around. And they held a lot of school dances. It was very nice. Everything was very proper.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Lots of chaperons?
FRED METZ: A lot of chaperons. The matrons from the girls' dormitories acted as chaperons. Everybody toed the mark, they didn't put up with any foolishness at all. You were just kicked out of school, and that's all there was to it. They didn't allow…
LOIS METZ: There weren't all that many civil rights.
FRED METZ: They didn't allow the leeway in those days that they do now. They told you what the rules were, and there was just no second chance. You didn't conform, you were through.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Really strict then.
FRED METZ: Yes.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you have any children?
LOIS METZ: No, we've never had children.
FRED METZ: We never have, unfortunately.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: You've been very active. Did you ever work, then?
LOIS METZ: Not really. During the years that Fred was stationed in Flagstaff, with the National Cash Register Company, he was gone most of the time.
FRED METZ: Three weeks out of every month I was gone.
LOIS METZ: And I worked at Babbitts' Drugstore, and I worked in [Gassman's?] Bookstore. And I worked in Mr. McGoth's [phonetic spelling] Indian store. I just did that summertimes for, oh, about three years. And then I decided that I'd rather have the time than the money. There wasn't all that much money in it. So that was my short business career.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: You've been very active in other things.
LOIS METZ: Well, I've done club work off and on. During the years that we lived in Flagstaff, Fred's father and mother were both invalids, and I had plenty of work at home.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: So why don't we start talking a little bit more about the Flagstaff area and what was in the downtown area, if you can remember.
FRED METZ: What was downtown?
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Yeah, what buildings there are.
FRED METZ: Well, downtown, if you'll look here on the first page under the cover of Flagstaff 1876-1976, I marked some of the old buildings, like here was Babbitts' Store, and here was a blacksmith shop, and here was the Whipple funeral parlor, and there's a vacant lot that's now the Monte Vista Hotel.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: So that's all on San Francisco Street?
FRED METZ: No, that's Aspen.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: That’s Aspen, 'cause Babbitts' is around the corner.
FRED METZ: Here's Babbitts' livery stable, where every Sunday morning I washed buggies and surreys, groomed and harnessed horses for the Sunday drivers during 1913, '14, and '15. You know the young men would hire their rigs and take their girls out driving. Sunday morning I'd come down and do all of that. Here's the Hunter Drugstore, which is the Moore Drugstore, with a fraternal hall upstairs. The bowling hall was in the basement, where during the years of 1913, '14, '15, I used to set up pins.
LOIS METZ: Incidentally, over the store that is Bledsoe’s old store, and that area there is where the first library in Flagstaff was.
FRED METZ: Yes, the first library was upstairs where Bledsoe's Men's Shop is. That was the first library.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Was there a full-time librarian?
FRED METZ: No.
LOIS METZ: Yes!
FRED METZ: Oh, yes there was! That's right.
LOIS METZ: I don't think she was a full-time librarian insofar as the library was open. I don't remember whether it was open every day or not.
FRED METZ: Then here is a building that is long since gone, directly behind Babbitts' where part of the Penney's store is, where the parking lot is, that was Babbitts' meat packing, where the cattle and hogs and sheep were killed out at a slaughterhouse east of Flagstaff, about five miles. The meat was brought in there fresh to the meat department every day, and then....
[END TAPE 1, SIDE 2; BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE 1]
FRED METZ: And it was a very, very fine grade of ham and bacon. There was an old German there in charge of....
LOIS METZ: Was that old Mr. Molenthaugh?
FRED METZ: Old Mr. Molenthaugh.
LOIS METZ: Speaking of Germans.
FRED METZ: M-O-L-E-N-T-H-A-U-G-H. And his daughter, Minnie was it? No. They only had one daughter, and she married....
LOIS METZ: Hilkins. Her name was Bertie.
FRED METZ: Bertie Molenthaugh, and she married Herb Hilkins, who was in charge of the meat department. And his son still works for Babbitts' in the meat department. HIS name is Herb Hilkin. Mr. and Mrs. Molenthaugh lived right there on the street - there's another.... auto parts that was in there. Firestone?
LOIS METZ: Western Auto, wasn't it?
FRED METZ: Western Auto. Well, that's where the Molenthaugh house was, right there.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Right down town?
FRED METZ: Yeah, and here was the packing plant, and he just walked across the street and he came to the packing plant. Here's the Methodist Church, there's the Emerson School, and there's the John Metz home, directly across the street from Emerson. When the last bell rung, I could go out my door and still go over and get in line. When the last bell rang, all of the grades, by grade, got in line - the boys in a separate line, and the girls in a separate line. The first grade marched in, then the second grade, and on down through the eighth. When the last bell started ringin', I could leave the house and go and get in my proper line and walk right in.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Is it still standing?
FRED METZ: Emerson School? Oh, no.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: No, the house.
FRED METZ: Where the house was, there is now a rock garage there. That's where it was.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: That little brick house....
FRED METZ: On the corner. That was the Milligan house next door to ours. That was the J.C. Milligan home. Mr. Milligan built three homes there. He built HIS home, he built our house, and he built the next one which was torn down, which is just a lot, and that was Dave Tate's home. Dave Tate had the nicest bar in Flagstaff. For years it was in the old Commercial Hotel. There were the three brick houses there. Before OUR folks bought the home, that was the home of Mr. Taylor, who was the first man to run the Normal School.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Superintendent?
FRED METZ: Superintendent, principal, yeah. Mr. Taylor. When he left - just before Blome came, he left - and my folks bought that home. Our original home was downtown, right across from the City Hall. I think there's a Texaco service station there now. That's where our home was for many years. We moved from there when Taylors went to Pasadena. In the early days, everybody retired and moved to Pasadena from Flagstaff.
Now, this here vacant lot right across from Babbitts' livery stable, that was a stockman's feed lot. That's where in the early days, this big lot here, and the cowboys would come to town for a two- or three-day rampage, they put their horses in there, and the horses were fed by the man in charge of Babbitts' livery stable. And sometimes they'd come in and they were so thirsty, and hadn't had a beer in so many months. Front Street then was just a series of bars and restaurants with hitching posts, and board walks out there. They'd bring their horses up there and tie 'em at the hitching posts and then they'd go in and proceed to get drunk, and sometimes those poor horses would stand there for two or three days. But the city marshal was pretty good about that, he'd come along and undo their reins from the hitching posts and ride the horse down to this stable and put 'em in there. When the cowboy sobered up, he'd have to go down there and claim his own horse and pay the storage fee, parking fee.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Who was the marshal?
FRED METZ: Oh, one of the early ones was George Hochderffer. He was one of the early marshals. There was quite a series of 'em, but the one I remember so well was Pat Hogan's uncle. What was his name?
LOIS METZ: Oh, yeah, I know who you mean.
FRED METZ: I thought I'd NEVER forget HIS name.
LOIS METZ: Wick Thompson.
FRED METZ: Wick Thompson. And he was later the first man in charge of the - he was the custodian of the first new high school up at the end of __________. What's the name of that school?
LOIS METZ: Well, it was the high school.
FRED METZ: It was the only high school.
LOIS METZ: The building is no longer there. They tore it down, dear.
FRED METZ: They did?
LOIS METZ: Yes, that's a parking lot now. The original high school is not there. It's very close to the site now.
FRED METZ: Well, anyway, after he retired as constable or marshal, he was custodian of that building for many years.
LOIS METZ: There was a man.... Wasn't he a relative… Rube Neill that was marshal _____.
FRED METZ: Rube Neill was marshal.
LOIS METZ: And then Rube went to....
FRED METZ: Winslow as city marshal.
LOIS METZ: But this.... The gal that called you the other day - Rudd. Wasn't Mr. Rudd city marshal?
FRED METZ: That's right! Mr. Rudd. He was another one of the little cattlemen that lost his cattle outfit, like many of 'em did, and HE was city marshal for awhile, Bill Rudd, William Rudd. And then HE went to Winslow. They offered him more money, and he went down there.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Was Winslow at the time comparable in size to Flagstaff?
FRED METZ: Lots bigger. It was a division point on the railroad, and all those big train crews coming in there and changing. It had three times the business in Winslow as Flagstaff. When we first moved there, Flagstaff was only about 2,000 population. But of course Winslow is just a wide place in the road now, since the train.... When that Harvey House ran there, that was the finest Harvey House in the entire system when they built that new Harvey House at Winslow. It was quite a common thing; we'd drive down there on a Sunday afternoon to have dinner at that Harvey House. And the next Sunday, we'd drive. They'd have a BEAUTIFUL Harvey House and dining room in Williams. We'd drive to Williams on a Sunday afternoon. They were all dirt roads in those days, it'd take you a couple of hours to drive down there, it's some twenty-five miles or so. We'd drive down there on a Sunday afternoon and have dinner at the Harvey House and then drive home. That was quite an experience.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: It was an all-day trip.
FRED METZ: Beautiful food, wonderful.
LOIS METZ: Nice food. In Flagstaff all they had were Chinese restaurants, and the food was okay, but it wasn't anything epicurean.
FRED METZ: Nothing exotic about it, and we got a little tiresome of it after awhile. It was quite a commonplace Sunday afternoon to see ten or twelve cars going to Williams in the afternoon to have dinner at the Harvey House. Then the trip to Winslow, which was about sixty miles (
LOIS METZ: That was a DAY’S trip.), a round trip, 120 miles, that was about a day's trip. People would leave after breakfast and saunter down there and have an early dinner and come home. Used to take about two hours and a half, to drive, one way.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Was there a road that went out by Bellmont?
FRED METZ: Oh, yes. The present road is just about where it is now.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did it go on to California?
FRED METZ: Just practically right where it is now.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: And that was fairly well traveled?
FRED METZ: Yes. In the early days, that was known as the National Old Trail. It was a dirt road. Each section was maintained by the county in which the road was. It was just a plain surfaced road. The majority of the roads in those days in Coconino County were surfaced with cinders from our cinders, you know. But that's the old, old, old main road right down through there. And that was surveyed. That road originally was surveyed by Beale, Lieutenant Beale.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh, uh-huh.
FRED METZ: He was commissioned to survey that road all the way through there, and he did. (reads from article) "There's a little-known fact, but it's a fact, that before Davis left office, he commissioned Edward Fitzgerald Beale to survey a camel trail across Arizona from Fort Defiance to the Colorado River, a route that corresponds to today's U.S. 66. And Beale brought the camels across the chain of forts from Texas to Albuquerque; from there across Arizona on his surveyed route to Fort Tejon [phonetic spelling], California. The camels were used as pack animals between Camp Verde, Arizona, and San Antonio, Texas, and between Fort Tejon and Los Angeles." Now, that Beale, there's a street in Flagstaff, Beale Street, and it's named after him. [ed. Don’t think the street is named after him, but after an early resident named “Beal”] This article here, very recently, I have the information that shows out here Fort Valley. And they say, "The valley is of course now known as FORT Valley. The beauty of that and Leroux Springs was greatly appreciated by Lieutenant E.F. Beale's party that came through in 1857." And then I have headlines, "With Camels." And attached newspaper dated June 16, 1976, "regarding Lieutenant E.F. Beale and the camel trail across Northern Arizona in 1857."
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Now, Leroux Springs is right there in Fort Valley?
FRED METZ: Right up north of there, and that was a WONDERFUL place for water. That's where a lot of Flagstaff water came from. (reading from article) "In 1881, John W. Young, a son of Brigham Young, established a timber camp near Leroux Springs on Leroux Prairie. He was supplying ties and supervised grading work for the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad, and called his camp Fort Mormon. At first the camp consisted of a collection of tents, but because of many reports of Apache raids, a stockade of double-length ties was erected, and a large log building became headquarters for the Arizona Cattle Company in 1883. And later it was changed to Fort Rickerson, following the name of the cattle company, and then later it was known as Fort Valley." Well, the terrible thing, they tore that log building down for firewood! ____________.
LOIS METZ: Yeah, it hasn't been all that long, because I can remember when I used to go out to Fort Valley a lot. The old fort was there.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: It was?
LOIS METZ: It was sort of tumbling down, but it was there.
FRED METZ: Her uncle's in charge of the experimental station at Fort Valley.
LOIS METZ: Uh-huh.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Go ahead, we'll get this on tape about your uncle and what his name was and where he came from.
LOIS METZ: Oh, yes. My uncle's name was G.A. Pierson. His name was Gustof Adolph Pierson. And my aunt hated "Gus" Pierson, so she used his initials, G.A., and we all called him Gay. I think he was probably known to his working friends as Gus Pierson, but in the family he was known as Gay. My aunt was my father's older sister - two sisters in the family. Gay came out and established that, and I can't tell you what the date was, but it would have to be.... Since my family came there in 1908, and it wasn't too long after that, I think, that he and my aunt were married, because I can remember we were there for the wedding. And then they lived out there at Fort Valley for many, many, many years after that. They had two children, and both their children were born while they were living at Fort Valley.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: That was the forestry experimental?
FRED METZ: Yeah.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Now, did he run that pretty much by himself, or did he have some help?
FRED METZ: A lot of help.
LOIS METZ: They had some help, but not so much in the wintertime. In the winter, he and one other ranger, I think, managed it. Then in the summertime, all sorts of students came out there. (
FRED METZ: Forestry students.)
LOIS METZ: They had a regular forestry course there, that the U.S. Forest Service sent all the young men out.
FRED METZ: They came from Princeton and Harvard and all over.
LOIS METZ: There was usually a dozen or more of them. I haven't been out there in many years, I don't know what there is there, but they had a lot of little cottages, and they always had a cook who fed the young men. I don't think he kept the cook during the wintertime, I think my aunt had to cook.
FRED METZ: Well, there was no one there.
LOIS METZ: But there was no one there.
FRED METZ: Most of the other forest rangers were married and had their own little houses.
LOIS METZ: And I can remember, too, they had a greenhouse there, and they had lots of experiments growing in that. But down in one end my uncle always had a lot of carnation plants, and all the winter he'd come to town with a couple of carnations for the family.
FRED METZ: Tell 'em about the experience with the colored cook when your aunt gave that big party out there _________.
LOIS METZ: He was an excellent cook, and my aunt had some sort of a do out there that was - oh, there must have been twenty-five or thirty people. So the cook went out and shot squirrels and made the most delicious chicken a la king - you know, these little patty cases?
FRED METZ: Using squirrel meat.
LOIS METZ: He used squirrel meat. Nobody every knew it, and nobody ever told 'em! (laughter)
FRED METZ: Wild squirrel abounded. And, oh, they were just....
LOIS METZ: (inaudible, same time as FM)
FRED METZ: And you know what depleted the squirrel population all in Northern Arizona. The government, up to its usual damned fool ideas, you know, they thought that the squirrel population was getting too heavy.
LOIS METZ: It was the porcupines that they were....
FRED METZ: Oh, yes, the porcupines were climbing the trees and eating this soft top in the bottom of the pine trees and causing 'em to die. So they came up with a good idea of a poisoning program to poison all the porcupines. So all across Coconino County, ALL the way over Apache, and into up around McNary, they took poison - they commissioned these forest rangers and they took this poison up, and they tied it up in these pine trees so the porcupines would get it and eat it and die. Well, the porcupines never ate a bit of it, but all the squirrels, very beautiful grey squirrels, ate it. And there was a time when you could hardly see a grey squirrel. When I was a boy in the sheep camp with my father, why, to walk from here over there to the post office, you'd encounter twenty-five, thirty beautiful grey squirrels, running, chirping, climbing the trees. They were so abundent and numerous, many, many people used to take them and kill them. They sent their skins back East to someplace - I think it was St. Louis - and had them tanned, and many of the women in Flagstaff had beautiful squirrel coats. (tape turned off and on) And the beautiful squirrel coats that so many of the women had. It was just terrible, the way.... And the porcupines just seemed to thrive on the poison. But that's the usual way the government does things.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Why don't we describe some of the people that you knew in town then.
FRED METZ: Well, there were several old characters. There's one in particular that I want to bring out.
LOIS METZ: _________.
FRED METZ: Johnny Love.
LOIS METZ: Oh, well, either one. Johnny Love ___________.
FRED METZ: Yeah. One in particular was Johnny Love, who was, in my opinion, and was thought by many people, as Flagstaff's loveable housecleaner. A gentleman, in every respect. That's what he did for a living, and there wasn't anybody in the world could clean house.... The women would go away, some of the wealthy women for the winter, and they were coming home. They'd write to Johnny and let him know that they were coming home. He had a key to their home, or the neighbor had the key, and he was allowed to go in. He even straightened out the dresser drawers and things like that. He was a hearty person. He used to walk from Flagstaff, had an uncanny sense of weather. Just before the first snow came in, he'd take out and walk to Cottonwood and Clarkdale and Camp Verde where he spent the winters, and come back in the spring, just like the robins.
There was another gentleman that was quite an early character, and his name was Schwalbe, S C H W A L B E, a German, and he was in charge of Babbitts' engine room. The engine room sat right across from the packing plant, and Babbitts' had their own light plant, you see. There was no electricity there. They had their own electrical plant, and also manufactured their own ice - they had an ice plant there. And I can remember as a boy in the afternoon goin' by, and that was just about where Babbitts' present drugstore and their men's furnishing department is, but it was in the back. And there was an entrance into the engine room. Here was this big engine going, the generating plant, and as boys we used to go down there and look in the door to see this big old generator generating electricity for Babbitts' Store. But in the evenings, Old Man Schwalbe had a chair, and he sat outside the door, tilted it back, and he had a concertina, and he'd sit back there in the chair and play all these German melodies, and us boys would gather around.
LOIS METZ: "Ach der lieber augustine." [phonetic spelling]
FRED METZ: That was one of the main ones, and it was really a time with Old Man Schwalbe. And up the street, up Railroad Avenue, just as you come under the underpass now, up on top was the big old Schwalbe home, and she had two or three rooms for rent, and ran the finest dining room in town - food, I've been told, was - I don't _________ - but she was supposed to have the finest eating place in Flagstaff. A lot of bachelors took three meals a day there with her.
LOIS METZ: Two-and-a-half. In those days, they had a lot of what they called boarding houses.
FRED METZ: Yeah, there were about four in Flagstaff, four boarding houses.
LOIS METZ: You just went there and ate your meals. Sometimes there were rooms available too. But I can remember my grandmother would travel - my grandfather always sort of looked forward to eating around these various boarding houses for a change.
FRED METZ: I look here at the list on the back here of the mayors in Flagstaff since 1894, which I knew fifty-four of 'em personally. Harold Sykes here, of 1946, was my brother-in-law. He married Mrs. Metz's sister. His father was famous, Stanley Sykes, the brother of Godfrey Sykes. In the early days they had cattle down on the Little Colorado River. I want to tell you about one of the last big fights with the Indians down there. Involved in this fight was Godfrey Sykes, Stanley Sykes, Bill Roden, Dan Hogan, Walter Durham, and that was it. How this fight originated, there was a bunch of renegade Indians in that country, running around down there. Billy Roden had a cattle ranch down on the Little Colorado River just about where.... What's the falls there?
LOIS METZ: Grand Falls?
FRED METZ: Grand Falls, right in that. Roden had headquarters there, and the Sykes brothers had. Well, Billy Roden came to town one day and left this cowboy there in charge of the place, and when he came back, the cowboy was killed and a bunch of the cattle there had been driven out. So he came into town and that's who he got, he got Stanley Sykes, and he go to the ranch. Gilbert Sykes and Billy Roden. He got Dan Hogan and Walter Durham, and they went in pursuit of 'em. There were twelve Indians, and there was quite a battle. Billy Roden was wounded twice, not severely. And the other man, Dan Hogan, was wounded. But they eliminated the twelve Indians - they killed all twelve of 'em. And that was about the last Indian fight. That occurred, as close as I can tell, around '85 - 1885 or 1886, from what I.... And Mr. Sykes', Stanley Sykes, told us about it, because you see, his son, Harold Sykes, who married Lois' sister, and we were, of course, very close to the family, and he related some of it to me. But that was quite a fight. It extended over several miles of pursuit, finally ended up from down there at Grand Falls, and ended up right there where Wynona is, where the old pass is, about fourteen miles. In the cedars, that's where they killed all the Indians, finished 'em off, this bunch of renegades, about twelve.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you want to go ahead and read your letter?
FRED METZ: Yes. I have a letter here I received from a very dear friend who was an old, old-time resident. She was born in Flagstaff, and I was so pleased with this Flagstaff 1876-1976, that I bought two or three copies for friends, and I mailed one to Thelma Campbell [Thomas] who lives now in Long Beach. And here's the letter I received from her the other day. She says, "Dear Fred and Lois, I certainly am enjoying Flagstaff 1876-1976. Thank you for sending it to me. In the July 1976 Arizona Highways, I read 'Flagstaff, One Century Old.' I enjoyed it, but felt that Al Doyle should be mentioned in every history of Flagstaff. I remember my father saying, 'Old Man Doyle came before the railroads.' So I'm really glad to see he is mentioned in the centennial celebration book. I can remember how I was impressed when Al Doyle in a buckboard would pass our house with Zane Grey, on their way to hunt bear in the San Francisco Peaks area. I've always thought Old Man Doyle was responsible for the foundation for many of Zane Grey's novels - certainly he was the only one I knew who had the knowledge of historical facts in a great number of Zane's books, like the book you have, Arizona's Dark and Bloody War. He was the one who passed these tales. I would like to see what the Flagstaff Arizona Historical Society has on Mr. Doyle. I only saw Mrs. Doyle two or three times. She always wore a small white apron, and her house was SO clean I was uncomfortable. We lived next to them, and next to Aunt Vaudy, and across from Miss Bullard. Then the house was moved, the one Elmer Jackson lived in across from the Catholic school. The little house is on the picture at the top of page 28, across from Miss Bullard, and next to Al Doyle. This is the one where we lived when the picture was taken of Gaston tying my shoe. Some of the buildings on Aspen Street 1908 are familiar. Some of them I'm glad you marked for me. I don't remember the Hochderffers, but there is Johnny Love. He used to walk from Flagstaff to Phoenix. And when he cleaned OUR houses, they really were clean. I wondered how the Greenlaws got the land east of town - now I know, they homesteaded it. We had so much fun out there. On page 9, the Robisons lived there for years." That's a house that I asked her a question about. "Marjory was the strangest child. She never came outside except to go to school. All the time we had the tennis courts, she never came out to play. Then the Sanfords owned the house. May Walker, who used to live next door to the Pollocks, and she was Tom Pollock's secretary for many years, and she married Al Sanford. On page 11, River de Flag. Remember how we used to go down there on our sleds? On page 22, Mrs. Doyle isn't wearing her white apron.” That's the picture taken of her with Bertha Kennedy on the logging truck in there. “I've been away so long, I forgot about the Hogans and the Camerons. Dr. Miller: When it was time for me to be born, Dr. Miller was out feeding his horse, they couldn't find him. I thank heavens for Nana Yost." That was Howard Yost's mother.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh, evidently was a midwife.
FRED METZ: Yeah. "I don't remember the building on page 36, but Mr. Sykes was such a brilliant man. Is it possible to get a copy of his book?" That's this one here, The Westerly Trend. "I think we should have a book about Al Doyle. I think that Fred Metz should be put in writing for the historical society about his early days at Meteor Crater. I'll probably think of a dozen other things to write, but then I could go on and on. Hope you can read this. With love to Lois and Fred - Thelma."
LOIS METZ: Well, her name was “Thomas.”
[END TAPE 2, SIDE 1; BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE 2]
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Okay, you were talking about the Campbells. The mother was a Lockett?
FRED METZ: Yeah, Thelma Campbell's mother was a Lockett. And there were three Campbell brothers in Flagstaff [who] had sheep. There was Colin Campbell. He lived at Ash Fork in the Harvey House. There was Hugh Campbell, whose house is shown here on the picture right next to the Camerons'. And then there was William H. Campbell, Thelma's father. They had the most beautiful home in Flagstaff. Mrs. Campbell, bless her dear heart, she was my Sunday school teacher, and she also, through her generosity, paid every month, contributed the largest portion of the Presbyterian minister's salary for years, so we could have a minister. And the minister that was there that was such a wonderful man as I was a boy was Mr. Clark, who later went out, was a missionary on the Indian reservation. A wonderful man, a wonderful preacher. But Mrs. Campbell, due to her generosity, was the reason that the Presbyterian Church existed as long as it did. It finally expired, and then they went in and had the one church, the Federated Church up there, across the street west of the Emerson School, and catty-corner from the Milligan house, and practically catty-corner from our house, 'cause we lived right next door to Milligans. So that's where I went to church many years at the Federated Church, after the Presbyterian Church closed. They couldn't support the two of 'em.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh, uh-huh, so they just put together.
FRED METZ: Just one.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Can you think of anyone else that you'd particularly like to talk about at this point, of the people in town?
FRED METZ: Oh, yes. One fine old gentleman in the early days was Fred Breen, the editor of the Coconino Sun, originated the Coconino Sun. He was one of Flagstaff's LEADING citizens, in my opinion: a very progressive man, a very knowledgeable man. When the original Hunter Drugstore sold out, he bought the Hunter Drugstore and put a druggist in there to run it. And then it was known for many years as the Breen Drug. And then he sold a partnership to Mr. Lewis, and it was known as the Breen-Lewis Drugstore. And then Lewis bought it out. First it was the Hunter Drugstore, and then the second owner was the Breen Drugstore, and then the third was the Breen-Lewis Drugstore. Then the fourth owner was the Lewis Drugstore, and now it's the fifth, the Moore Drugstore. Fred Moore still owns the controlling interest in it, lives down out of Mesa.
There's another family that I would like to talk about, who were close personal friends of my mother and father. They came there after the Hermans moved away and gave up their apartment store. The Nackards moved in and opened their own store. It was known as Nackard's New York Store. It was right down there on the corner across from that bar that's there on the corner. I forget what's in there now, but Mr. and Mrs. K.J. Nackard were very, very, very close friends of my mother and father's. They later then opened another store, built a store, right next door to William Switzer's hardware store, right south. They built that building in there. They moved their store down there then.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: It's where Fine's, I believe, is.
FRED METZ: Yes, Fine, that's right. That was a real family, wonderful citizens.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you know… did he have an accident during the big snow when he was getting snow off the roof? Did you hear anything about it?
FRED METZ: I don't know about that.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: I heard it from one other person, and I was wondering if anyone else had heard that he fell off the roof or something.
FRED METZ: I'm not familiar with that. It may have happened, but it may have been the time when I was gone. Oh, in the BIG snow, I was there, because this picture here showing me shoveling, I was shoveling in there SOME place.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: I was thinking, it must have been later, because the person telling that came in the twenties. So it must have been in the thirties.
LOIS METZ: Yes, there WAS a terrific snowstorm, wasn't it about '38 or '39, somewhere along in there?
FRED METZ: There was a big one in '48. Forty-eight and '49 was a big one. They had a total of 22.2 [inches] in December, and 104.8 [inches] in January.
LOIS METZ: Well, we weren't there.
FRED METZ: That's what I said, we were gone many years.
LOIS METZ: There was another storm, it had to be in the late thirties, or even the not-so-late thirties, because I was working downtown at Gassman's Gift Shop, Bookshop. Oh, there were a LOT of people caught in town. It just came on overnight, and all these people who were in Flagstaff.... (microphone scraped, obscuring comment) I can remember that first day they cleared the sidewalks, you know, about so. I can remember there was a car over in front - the bank building was still over there on the corner of Aspen, and was that Leroux?
FRED METZ: Yeah, it's where the five-and-ten-cent store was.
LOIS METZ: Yeah, it's where Sprouse-Reitz is now. There was a car that had been left there that night, and it was still there in the spring. They never more than just cleared a pathway down through the middle of the street, and that car was still there. I can remember all these people stuck in town. We sold out all our games, all our playing cards, all our magazines, and any book that was not a technical book. We were just cleaned out. And that was right around Christmastime. By the time we got ready to take our inventory, we didn't really have a lot much work to do, because the place had been cleaned out.
FRED METZ: Isn't that the one I was snowed-in, in Prescott?
LOIS METZ: I think so. We always had a joke about this: While Fred was traveling, he never got snowed-in, he always got snowed-out, and I had to shovel the sidewalk. So kidding me, but it turned out to be bitterly true, Fred took me down to try these snow shovels out at Bill Switzer's. He said he wanted to fit the snow shovel to me, 'cause I was the one that used it. It turned out, by gosh, I WAS the one who used it! (laughter)
KRISTINE PRENNACE: While we're on kind of this area, do you remember any large fires in Flagstaff?
LOIS METZ: I don't remember any. I remember A big fire. It was over, hm, vicinity of the light plant. I don't remember what burned, but there were a lot of things burned, 'cause we got up and went to that one. But the first year that we were married, there were MANY thunder and lightening storms that summer. And what we did for amusement was to go to fires. It seemed like there was at least ONE big fire every week. We didn't have the money to go to the movies, so we went to the fires.
FRED METZ: We went to fires instead.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Now, the fire department wasn't very large then, was it?
FRED METZ: Oh, no, they were all volunteers, they had one truck. But they did a marvelous job, they did a marvelous job.
LOIS METZ: There was a fire not far from our house, and it happened one Sunday afternoon. So we went to the fire. And of course everybody was trying to help save things. The front porch - it was built on a slope - and the front porch was about four feet above the ground, up from the level of the ground.
FRED METZ: You came up the stairs onto the front porch.
LOIS METZ: And all these enthusiastic helpers pushed an upright piano out on the front porch and over the edge, and it landed flat on its back.
FRED METZ: Went through the rail, just broke into a thousand pieces.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh, dear!
FRED METZ: Everybody was rushin' in, grabbin' a chair or something, and taking it out on the lawn and saving it. Three or four of 'em got behind the piano, and they just went right out, and pushed it right through the rail and it dumped over and smashed - dropped four feet and just broke wide open.
LOIS METZ: I think probably it would have been so much better to leave it in there and let it burn so they could collect the insurance on it.
FRED METZ: Yeah, this way there was no insurance.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh! So you do remember a lot of the fires.
LOIS METZ: Yes, there were a lot of fires. I'm trying to think, what was it? There was something big. There was about a block burned. We went down, it happened around four o'clock in the morning, and it was.... I can remember that we thought that the old Tupanky [phonetic spelling] house was going to go. But it was over back of that.
FRED METZ: Close to the college.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: What about any flooding?
FRED METZ: Oh, yes, that was a normal procedure, every spring River de Flag would come down. (microphone scraped, obscuring comment) All the homes along there kept sandbags, had to pile sandbags up on the edge of River de Flag, the full length as it came through town, all the way down 'til it went under the Santa Fe Railroad tracks. And it always flooded the south part of town. Every year they'd have to build these sandbags up, oh, three feet high.
LOIS METZ: Well, I can remember it coming into the schoolyard there at the Emerson School. I don't think it ever went into the basement, because it's quite a slope there, you know, down to the river. But it used to come right up. Scared 'em to death, even if it didn't come in.
FRED METZ: See, the river was right along the east boundary of the school. There was a flood EVERY year. They'd have a cloudburst up on the Peaks, you know, WHAM! about thirty minutes, here it was, right down through the middle of town.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Yeah, really a lot then. What about some dry years then - just the opposite?
FRED METZ: Yes, many summers forest fires around town would be terrible. People from town volunteered to go out to fight the fires to keep it from getting into town. They didn't have near the efficient methods that they have now of fighting it. There weren't the people available that there are now.
LOIS METZ: The town didn't cover as much territory, by any means, as it does now.
FRED METZ: Usually they just burned themselves out.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Well, what did you do for city water supply then?
FRED METZ: We had this little reservoir. Of course the original reservoir was the one up at the Old Town Spring. But then the Santa Fe Railroad had a great interest in producing an adequate water supply, because that's where all their trains watered there, you see.
LOIS METZ: Steam engines had to have water.
FRED METZ: You see, they built the first city reservoir, which is out right in the vicinity as you're going toward the canyon out there, the old reservoir, in the vicinity where the old country club is. And then it shows the picture here, the construction of the NEW city reservoir. And that was the bonds and everything, the bigger part of the bonds on that were bought by the Santa Fe Railroad, because of the town progressed, didn't have enough....
LOIS METZ: Well, originally, ALL the water that was in the reservoir came from the springs on the Peaks.
FRED METZ: Yeah, it came down.
LOIS METZ: And the water in Flagstaff was absolutely wonderful. It was so pure it didn't need to be treated at all. And it was so pure that they used it in batteries, instead of distilled water. They just used tap water any place that you use distilled water.
FRED METZ: In 1926, there's the construction of the second one. Of course since then, I understand, I've been gone, you see, they've developed, the great part is out around Lake Mary, and then up on....
LOIS METZ: Woody Springs.
FRED METZ: Woody Springs was taken over by the City, and water developed up there. I know at the time my brother-in-law was mayor, he had a great deal to do with the developing of the water, and that was during 1946.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Was that when Lake Mary started?
FRED METZ: Yeah, that was thirty-one years ago.
LOIS METZ: But of course Lake Mary's been there a long, long time, but originally it was never intended for a Flagstaff water supply.
FRED METZ: No, it was only used in later years.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: They used it for the mill, didn't they?
FRED METZ: Well, no. I don't know what it was used for to be very frank. Might have been. But there's no pipeline from there into the mill.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh. Okay, I think what might have happened was that they THOUGHT they could use it, and then they realized how many times it would have to be pumped before it got up here, so they had to abandon it.
FRED METZ: I think that's right. It was never used, I'm sure of it.
LOIS METZ: Because the dam that was across there that formed the lake was not all that big a project. So probably they weren't out all that much.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: They had a railroad, didn't they?
FRED METZ: Arizona Lumber and Timber? Yeah. I worked on it. That went out to the logging camp and picked up the logs and brought home. Each night we brought home about twenty-four cars of logs. Put 'em right along side, and they dumped 'em into the mill pond where the logs were soaked for several days to get the dirt and rock and stuff out of 'em, so when they were ready to take 'em up the incline into the saw, that a lot of the dirt was out of 'em, so it didn't knock the teeth out of the saw. That was the reason. And it was an easy way to push the logs over and get 'em to where the contraption pulled the logs up to the second floor where the mill was, where the sawyers were.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: We talked… well, we really havn’t talked about the social life of the community. You mentioned before that you were involved in the Women's Club.
LOIS METZ: Yes, I don't remember when the Women's Club was started, because when we went back there in the early thirties, it was going. I remember I joined, and about then was when they decided that they really needed a building of their own, and they put their shoulder to the wheel and built the building that eventually - or not so eventually, either - shortly after they took it over they found out that they weren't going to be able to support it. So the library came in, and they just kept one small section to use as the Women's Club. But they made the money any way they could, and I remember one way they could, was to feed the Rotary Club luncheons once a week. Before the year was out, it was awfully hard to get volunteers. (laughter) And I'm not sure that the Rotary wasn't pretty tired of meatloaf! (laughter)
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Well, we've… that was part of the social life. Do you remember anything else?
FRED METZ: Yes. In the early days, the greatest part of the social life revolved around the fraternal organizations. There was a Masonic Lodge, the Oddfellows and the Rebekahs. There was the Elks. Until they got the separate halls, they all met upstairs over the Hunter Drugstore. That was the lodge hall. Each lodge used it one night a week. That, and the social events of the churches - that's where the activity was, the lodges and the churches. The churches had potluck dinners all the time. The lodges had dinners. The Rebekah women, the branch of the Oddfellows, and the Eastern Star, the branch of the Masonic Lodge. That's where ____________, it was in people's homes. There was all kinds of parties in the wintertime, sleigh rides and taffy pulls. That was a great popular sport.
LOIS METZ: For the young.
FRED METZ: Yeah, they'd go out on a sleigh ride and come home and drink hot chocolate and then pull taffy all evening, 'til about eight o'clock or 8:30. You had to be home by nine.
LOIS METZ: But apropos, the social life at the fraternal organizations, when I was married, my grandmother said, "Lois, I have a piece of advice for you. Don't join the Eastern Star. All they do is wash dishes for the Masons. You'll be eligible to go to anything that there is up there, because your husband IS a Mason, and you won't be involved in the dish washing."
FRED METZ: So she never joined the Eastern Star.
LOIS METZ: So I never joined the Eastern Star.
FRED METZ: Which was smart.
LOIS METZ: There was another thing that my grandmother told me that stood me in good stead, and I suppose it would be true in any small community. She said, "Don't ever say anything about anybody until you've lived here long enough to know who's related to who."
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Right! There were a lot of people interrelated.
FRED METZ: A lot of 'em, that's true.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh! there's something else I forgot to ask you. Do you remember any of the big epidemics or bad illnesses that affected the town?
LOIS METZ: Well, of course the flu epidemic was there, but I wasn't, and neither was Fred, he was in the service.
FRED METZ: I was in the Navy then.
LOIS METZ: I only know - we were living on a ranch. That was when we were living on the ranch out in Peoria. We weren't that involved. We had the flu in the family. And later we moved to Phoenix after the epidemic had partially subsided. It seems to me that it came along in November, October-November, in 1918. And we moved to Phoenix in January. I had the flu then, the very tail end of it. Of course, by the time we got there, the crest of it had passed, and I can remember my father going in - he had his office in the Adams Hotel in Phoenix, and he went in by train every day. They had to wear these little face masks. Everybody had a little mask so you wouldn't breathe any germs.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: How did you feel when you had it?
LOIS METZ: TERRIBLE! You know, you ached all over. Well, you were just so weak. You felt just like you do with any kind of flu that you have now, only worse - having it in spades, really.
FRED METZ: I think the town that suffered the worst in Northern Arizona was Williams - the greatest number of deaths. (microphone scraped, obscuring comment) due to the flu epidemic.
LOIS METZ: One of my friends was a teacher at the school (microphone scraped, obscuring comment) [in Williams?] at that time, and she said there were only a half a dozen of 'em still on their feet. The schoolhouse was full, any place that they could find to place cots. So there were people that could be looked after en masse, rather than just going from house to house. Of course, I think by moving the victims out, perhaps the rest of the family would escape it - not necessarily so.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Yeah, that was a bad thing.
FRED METZ: Oh, it was terrible, very.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Do you remember much about city government in Flag?
FRED METZ: Not a great deal. City council form of government. There was always factions fighting. The majority of people sought the office for their own benefit, or the benefit of the company they were working for. Just like it is today, typical.
LOIS METZ: I was going to say its not all that different from today.
FRED METZ: No, no different today.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Do you remember what Flagstaff's relationship was to the rest of Arizona?
FRED METZ: It was a great place for people from Phoenix to come for the summer. Many, many Phoenix families had summer homes there. There are two places: there was Prescott area, and Flagstaff. Of course Flagstaff was the gateway to the Indian reservation during the summer when the Indian activities were around, Indian dances. I can't recall just what year it was that Flagstaff got to be a tourist center, but I would say it was in the early twenties, wouldn't you, when it became known? It wasn't until good roads were developed, because people wouldn't fight the roads, driving.
LOIS METZ: It used to be two days to go to Phoenix. Drove like crazy and got to Prescott the first night, and you drove like crazy and got to Phoenix in time for dinner the second night.
FRED METZ: Two days, full trip.
LOIS METZ: Of course the roads were NOT paved.
FRED METZ: You went to Ash Fork, and then you went south to Prescott. Then you left Prescott and went down through Dewey and Mayer, Humboldt, down through Bumblebee in the early days, through Cordes - not Cordes Junction, but through Cordes - right on down.
LOIS METZ: It was in the middle twenties that they developed the White Spar Road into Prescott, so that you didn't come over by Dewey and Humboldt, and that cut some time off. And then eventually that road was paved. At first it was not a paved road, it was just a gravel road. When the road was paved, then you began to be able to make it in a day. And eventually, all of the old-timers drove so hard then, would roll over in their graves, if they knew you could make it in two hours now.
FRED METZ: I can remember leaving Ash Fork, going to Prescott in the spring or in the winter and you'd come across that big valley there, (
LOIS METZ: Chino.)
FRED METZ: Chino Valley. I've seen as many as fifteen roads side-by-side. There was no paving, come down there, it had been raining, and here was your car, getting bogged down. They steered their car to the closest big clump of grass so they wouldn't sink in. And then you'd see another clump, and you'd gun it and drive over to THAT. So there was maybe fifteen or twenty roads there, until spring came and they got a chance to....
LOIS METZ: Things got dried out.
FRED METZ: Oh, it was something! It was.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Was there a large police department in Flagstaff?
FRED METZ: No. They only had a night marshal and a day marshal for years - that's all they had. And they could handle it without any problem because the majority of people had some respect for the law, which they don't have anymore. Kids were off the street at nine o'clock, and I mean off the street! because if they didn't, the marshal would call the parents up and tell 'em to come get 'em, and they came and got 'em. They weren't roaming the streets. Nine o'clock was the curfew. I can still remember when the curfew…
LOIS METZ: Yeah, they used to have a curfew. The whistle blew at nine o'clock.
FRED METZ: And that was it! you'd better get home! And they did. They were all off the streets.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did he have a lot of trouble with Front Street, that area?
FRED METZ: The heavy drinking was down in there. But still they had a respect for the law. If they had any trouble, he just called the sheriff's office where it is now, you know, and they could have a couple of deputies down there in a hurry, but very seldom did they ever have to resort to that. People weren't raising hell like they do now. A person got drunk, very few of 'em got unruly. What they'd do if they got drunk, some of their friends would take 'em home, take 'em over to the hotel, the Weatherford or the Commercial, and put 'em to bed. The marshal would tell 'em, and that's what they'd do. It was entirely different.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: You told me before about the "barn cure." Maybe this might be the time to bring that up.
FRED METZ: Yeah. Well, this was an episode that happened. I was familiar, my father told me about it when I was about ten, twelve years old. I saw this man walking down the street one day when we were downtown and I asked my father what was wrong, he walked so peculiarly. Father said, "Well, that fellah got the barn cure here about two years ago, and I'll tell you later on in life about it." Well, about two years later when I was fourteen, I saw the man again, and I asked my father, "What's this barn cure?" "Well," he said, "it's the finest thing I know to cure a rape that has ever existed. This is what they did to that man, and that's why it sticks in the minds of anybody who has funny ideas." He said this man had raped this little girl, she was about thirteen. He was pursued by the sheriff's office there in town, and they caught him. They just take him to an old barn, an old shed, not a big one, and they sink a post down in the middle of the barn. The barn was about maybe ten by twelve feet, just an old shed. They sink this four-inch pole, or an old cedar post down in there, just high enough that he could straddle it. Then they would take his testicles and make him straddle it, and they'd take his testicles and hold them out, and they take a big staple and behind the testicles, they stapled him right to the top of this post. And then they pile brush around it and they hand him a sharp knife, they open the door, and they set the brush afire. Now, it's up to him. He'll either castrate himself and come out through the door, or he'll perish in the flames. This man elected to castrate himself, which he did, and they took him to a doctor right there and had him treated so he wouldn't bleed to death. But that's the barn cure, and that's what they should have today. If we had the barn cure today, we wouldn't have any more rape, because there isn't anything more impressive on a young man at the age of fourteen, to have that explicitly described to you. Don't you think I'm right?
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Pretty gruesome.
FRED METZ: There is nothing gruesome about it! Think of the poor girls! What THEY go through. I think that's the way they should be treated today. In fact, if I had anything to do with it, ANYBODY that raped would be castrated the next day. They wouldn't wait for a trial, they'd castrate him right then and there, and put a stop to it.
[END TAPE 2, SIDE 2; BEGIN TAPE 3, SIDE 1]
KRISTINE PRENNACE: There's another historical event that I wanted to ask you about, if you recollect it. Do you remember Prohibition?
FRED METZ: Yes. Flagstaff had, as I told you, down on Front Street, or Railroad Avenue, a very large number of bars. Practically there was a bar and then a Chinese restaurant. Most of the drinking was confined to that area. There were two or three outstanding bars, very nice places, where the gentlemen of the city did their drinking. In those days, ALL the bars had the free lunch, which is unknown of. We could walk in there… and my father had taken me in, and here'd be this, down at the end of the bar here'd be at noon, starting about eleven o'clock, here would be hams and roast beef, and pig knuckles and pickled eggs, and bread to make sandwiches. The ham was sliced, the beef was sliced. All kinds of pickles and things. Sauerkraut, hot dogs - you just went in and bought yourself a five-cent beer, went down there and make you a sandwich and stood there and ate it, whatever you wanted; free lunch. They were really, really wonderful.
LOIS METZ: That wasn't Prohibition.
FRED METZ: When Prohibition came along, ____ all of that. There was an awful lot of bootlegging around Flagstaff, an awful lot of whiskey made out in the hills, and some names I won't mention, because they're not there, made a lot of money making illicit whiskey. Some of their children still live in the town, and I wouldn't mention any names for that reason, 'cause they had nothing to do with it. But there was a great deal of bootlegging. When Arizona first went dry, New Mexico was wet, and they brought whiskey in from New Mexico. California was still dry, and I remember an incident of a couple of friends of mine, they were older acquaintances, not friends, who had quite a run between Flagstaff and Needles. They'd buy their whiskey and bring it over into Flagstaff. Some of the roundabout ways, there was one road that they would - just around Bellemont they could go north on a road there about Bellemont that'd bring 'em in around Fort Valley, and then come into Flagstaff from the north. And of course the sheriff's posse was never looking for them there. They was always looking for the whiskey to be brought in on the road from California or from New Mexico. These fellahs got by with that for quite a long time. Well, finally somebody wised the sheriff's office up, so the sheriff's office one night laid for these fellahs. Well, they had this great big ol' Studebaker touring car just loaded to the gunnels with cases of whiskey. But they were coming, and a friend of theirs heard that the sheriff's office was laying in wait for them, so he went out to warn them. He passed the sheriff's posse that was hidden, went way on past several miles, and was able to stop 'em and tell 'em that the sheriff was laying for 'em down the road.
So there was a spot there, just the other side of Bellemont a little ways before they turned up. They thought they would unload the whiskey and then drive right in and let the sheriff stop 'em. Well, they did, and off the road about fifty feet was what appeared then to be this big ol' log laying there on the ground. Well, all that it was, it was a bright moonlight night, and the moon was casting the shadow of an upright tree that threw the shadow on the ground 'til it looked like a great big ol' log. So they go over and unload all of these cases of whiskey, pushed it up against what they thought was a log, came back to the car and drove, and the sheriff stopped 'em, and they didn't have a thing, see. So they thought the next morning they'd go out and retrieve the liquor, which they did. And when they got out there, to where it was, here were all these cases of whiskey, piled right out there in this open flat, with nothing around it! No one had seen it, because there wasn't much traffic, you see, on the road, but they thought it was hidden up against a log, and there was nothing there.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: I can't remember, were you in Flagstaff during the Depression?
FRED METZ: No. I was in '31. I came up and took over that territory for the National Cash Register Company in '31, and I was there 'til '41, ten years.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Do you remember from listening to other people talk, how the Depression had affected Flagstaff?
FRED METZ: I think that Flagstaff was one of the least hurt cities in the United States, for several reasons. People were more or less thrifty - more thrifty in those days than they are now. Of course, there were some people that suffered. Some of the businesses closed, but the county took care of a great many. But I would say as a whole, that Flagstaff suffered LESS during the Depression than any other town in the United States. The mills closed, and there were some people there, of course, that lost their job, but people were thrifty in those days, they didn't rely on welfare. Prit near everybody had savings. They had their money put away into savings, so when the Depression came along, they lived off of their savings. Not like now, they didn't run to welfare.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: World War II?
FRED METZ: I was in San Francisco.
LOIS METZ: I was. One of the things that I do remember, is the way that Flagstaff was affected when they began building the munitions depot.
FRED METZ: At Bellemont.
LOIS METZ: There wasn't anything at Bellemont, so all of these construction workers came into Flagstaff while they were getting ready for them out at Bellemont. And living right across from the school as we were, there were people living in their cars, families, living in their cars, and a lot of little children, you know, and they'd play over in the schoolyard during the day. The moms would take the blankets out and hang them on the fence.
FRED METZ: There was a plank fence all around.
LOIS METZ: And they just lived there.
FRED METZ: They lived there.
LOIS METZ: It was an awe-inspiring sight. It was really something.
FRED METZ: There's a very amusing experience that occurred about that time. There was a man that had this campground right out there on Railroad Avenue, just a block-and-a-half past the present location of the Arizona Sun on the left-hand side. His name was Brooks, Frank Brooks, a very good friend of mine. He had the little grocery store there, and had about fifteen just little one-room cabins, with two or three water pipes out in front and a couple of community toilets. Of course when these people came in there in swarms to work at the munitions depot, they immediately hired all of those at once. Well, most of 'em didn't have any money, so they came to Frank Brooks and asked him if they could have a little credit at his grocery store until they got their first pay, and he said, "Yes, you get your first pay, you must come and pay me." They get paid once a week the men told him. So the first week came by, Saturday night, and they came in to get some groceries, and he said, "Well, wouldn't you like to settle up?" They said, "We didn't get paid yet." He couldn't understand, so came the second week, and they didn't get paid, they told him. So he told 'em, "There's something wrong here, two weeks and you haven't been paid? Didn't they make some kind of a record?" All those fellahs wore bib overalls, you know. You know, the watch pocket kind. So there were three or four of 'em in there and one of 'em said, "Well, all we've got is this little slip paper tellin' about how much time we worked." He pulled it out, and it was two checks. They were so dumb and ignorant they didn't know what a check was. That's a fact!
Then another incident I heard about the same time, I was down the street one evening, and there were some weird characters that came out there with their families to build that, from all over. I saw this couple coming along, and you could tell, they all wore their overalls in boots, and they wore these railroad-type caps, and they were looking in the store there, DeVaney's Boot Store, right along there. I think James has got a boot store there now. So this woman said to the man who was her husband, "Oh, you know, I never have owned a pair of store-boughten shoes. We've got a little money now. Couldn't I go in and buy that pair of shoes there on sale? They're only two-and-a-half." "Why," he said, "sure, go in and help yourself. I just paid fifteen dollars this afternoon for a gee-tar." I stood there, liked to died laughin'. Oh, there's some weird characters came in to build that munitions depot. They brought 'em from the mountains in the South, all over.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Maybe talk about some of the other racial ethnic groups that were in town. Were there any Indian families in town?
FRED METZ: Very few. In the early days, the Indians girls were used in the summertime as maids, they came in and worked. A few families had Indian girls. It wasn't until McNary bought the Flagstaff Lumber and Timber Company that - there were two colored families in town, that's all. Then they imported all these colored lumberjacks to work at McNary and to work at the mill. And they imported all of the colored people in, and we only HAD a few colored families in town.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: How did that affect the town?
FRED METZ: Well, I don't know. I don't think it had a great deal of effect on it. Do you, Lois?
LOIS METZ: No, not too much. Back then, they had a colored school, the Dunbar School, and the kids went over there. I don't remember about high school, but I don't think that many of 'em went on as far as high school.
FRED METZ: No, most of 'em didn't.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: They had to work?
FRED METZ: There were a lot of Mexican children that went to high school, but they were just considered part of us.
LOIS METZ: Mexicans had always been there.
FRED METZ: The Mexicans had ALWAYS been there.
LOIS METZ: The Indians and the colored people would have stood out.
FRED METZ: The Indians all went to school out on the Indian School Reservation, you see, to schools out there.
LOIS METZ: I can't remember an Indian kid in school.
FRED METZ: No. Not during OUR period.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Not at all?
FRED METZ: No.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Things are different now.
LOIS METZ: Way back there, you were asking about what they did for fun, the social life. You should get him to tell you about the Fourth of July picnics.
FRED METZ: Oh, THOSE were a marvelous event. They were held out at the old reservoir site. The fraternal organizations, like the Masonic Lodge and the Elks and the Oddfellows, would furnish the main things like the barbecued meat and the beans and things, and the bread. So two or three days before the Fourth of July, they usually celebrated two days, the third and fourth. Some cattleman would donate a yearling calf, and some farmer would donate three or four hogs, or three or four farmers would each donate a hog, and two or three sheepmen would all donate a sheep, so they had this tremendous barbecue pit out there, and they would barbecue all this meat, plenty of it! So when you came out, all you had to do was to bring your knife and fork, everything else was furnished. And it was really something to go out there and see that. And I can remember as a boy, you'd start walking, or ride your bicycle out there. It was about four miles, and buggies and somebody with a big float full of canvas and straw, taking a whole bunch of people, get out there in time. There was in the morning not too much in the way of entertainment. But prit near all the lodges - or not all the lodges, but some of 'em - and individuals had kegs of beer out there on planks, and some of 'em brought their own hard liquor, some people got drunk, but very few. And then you just went up where all this beef and pork and lamb was barbecued. You could have your choice, or some of all. Old Keller's Bakery donated I don't know how many hundreds of loaves of bread. You had bread, you had beans. Of course many people didn't eat salad in those days, but some of the folks brought their own salad. Then you went over around your group, in the back of your buggy or under the shade of a pine tree. You put the canvas or blanket, and your friends would come, you'd all eat together. Then in the afternoon, startin' maybe about two o'clock, was when they'd have the bronc riding, right around in the trees, no saddle. And then there was several exhibitions of pistol shooting and tug of wars and wrestling. They'd have it out there several years, and then they used to have 'em at the old fairgrounds, which was located there about now where the university football field is. And they had all kinds of entertainment then. But the early days, it was out there at the reservoir. They'd build a platform and then in the evening, the dancing. They had an orchestra, and people would dance until midnight.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Fireworks?
FRED METZ: Yeah, they had to be awful careful with the forest __________. It was about as nice a celebration as one could ever experience.
LOIS METZ: That was DEFINITELY pre-Pow Wow.
FRED METZ: Oh, yeah, that's long before the Pow Wows were ever thought of. When the Pow Wows started, that was originally put on by a lot of the merchants in town to get a lot of people in town, and get a lot of tourists in town. It was just a money-making deal, and it still is, and it's the worst thing in the world. It's the worst thing that ever happened to Flagstaff, that Indian Pow Wow.
LOIS METZ: Well, way back when, when the Indians came in, that was their one big thing they did once a year.
FRED METZ: They came in once a year, and it took 'em a week.
LOIS METZ: They came in, in their wagons.
FRED METZ: They camped along the way. It took 'em a week to come in from the reservation with their wagon. And they had a parade and the merchants all threw in, and at the end of the parade they'd go by a place and they got a bale of hay, they got some oats, they got maybe a watermelon or two, they got some meat, the cattlemen gave the meat with a pretty good price to the town, so then all the Indians picked all of this stuff up, and then went on up to their campground in the City Park, and they had their camp up there. They cooked their meat and they had their watermelons and they had feed for their horses. It wasn't too bad in those days, but the thing got out of hand, in my opinion. There's just....
LOIS METZ: Oh, it's gotten so big, and of course it's easy for them to come in now with their ______equipment.
FRED METZ: And there's trouble. There'll be trouble every year, just as long as they have it - problems with the Indian trouble.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Was there anything out in East Flagstaff that you can remember?
FRED METZ: Nothing.
LOIS METZ: Oh, the only thing that was out there was every summer they had the Chautauqua: lectures and concerts and things out there. There was a huge round of - what was it? It was a missionary-type thing. It was religiously sponsored.
FRED METZ: Thirty days it lasted.
LOIS METZ: There was a big auditorium tent, and oh, revival meetings and so forth (
FRED METZ: Every night.). But that was where they had their chautauqua things. I think probably four things during the summer: lectures, concerts....
FRED METZ: But all the various religious people - you know, if Phoenix wanted to get out, they'd come up there and bring their tents and spread their tents.
LOIS METZ: Conference grounds.
FRED METZ: Conference grounds! That's right, it was religious conference grounds. They had a MONSTROUS big dining room, and you could pay for your meals there, and they got pretty good meals, 'cause I've eaten there a couple of times. And then they had this big tent, kinda like a church. In the morning and in the afternoon and the night, there was just CONSTANTLY church activities going on.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: And that was what the chautauqua was?
LOIS METZ: No, the chautauqua was separate. It was sponsored, I think, by these various religious organizations - I don't remember that exactly - but I remember that these various events. The chautauqua headquarters was back in the East, and they'd book these various things all across the country.
FRED METZ: Yeah.
LOIS METZ: I'm trying to think of something comparable. It was sort of like a roadshow company, where they'd be booked here, there, and yonder, and they always booked a few of 'em. At that time, the Normal School was not all that active. The Normal School did things for the Normal School, and that was that. I'm trying to think of the famous man that I heard.
FRED METZ: Well, William Jennings Bryant came through once.
LOIS METZ: Well, I didn't hear him.
FRED METZ: I did. I heard William Jennings Bryant speak.
LOIS METZ: They'd have choruses and concert-type things. During the summer there would be perhaps three events, and you bought a season ticket for it. And it would be - I can't remember where it was ever more than one performance or not. At the time I was too young to be paying too much attention to that sort of thing - I just remember going to them. That was one of the....
FRED METZ: Where the Greenlaws old home is, now that was the end, there was nothing out there at all. Nothing just from there on.
LOIS METZ: Fred said he used to hunt rabbits out there all the time.
FRED METZ: Yes, rabbits out there.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Switzer Canyon, what was that?
FRED METZ: Well, that was just a place they called Switzer Canyon.
LOIS METZ: Nothing there, nobody.
FRED METZ: No, nothing there.
LOIS METZ: But the quarry was right on the edge of it.
FRED METZ: The stone quarry, where all the red sandstone in the courthouse and various buildings, was quarried.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Do you remember a place called China Canyon at all? Is that where the high school - I mean, out towards that area?
FRED METZ: That was never China Canyon, that area out there. The Clarks had a big homestead out there and there was Clarks Pasture, to my knowledge. I used to play out there as a boy.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Yeah, I think it was in the twenties or something.
FRED METZ: That's new. That's some other name that was put on it.
LOIS METZ: Well, he's talking about Clarks Pasture, and then just a little bit beyond that, Mr. Tom Pollock had a ranch, a nice big ranch house, and a half-mile race track, because he raised race horses.
FRED METZ: That's in that area where all those homes were built in there.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: The Mountainview Estates, I think they call 'em.
LOIS METZ: Is that Mountainview Estates? It's on the left-hand side, just before you get to the Sechrist School.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Right.
FRED METZ: Tom Pollock had a beautiful place up there. That's where he kept his race horses. And he'd take his race horses down to Phoenix every fair - fair in November - and he raced 'em. He had a horse trainer that lived there, and then later Andy Matson took over the place and ran it for him, and started another dairy out there. Matsons had a dairy there.
LOIS METZ: That would be back in the twenties.
FRED METZ: Yeah. That was one of the Matsons. Mrs. Mike Purcell is the oldest Matson girl. One of Flagstaff's nicest families were the Matsons.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Now did most families just have their own cows at home?
FRED METZ: A lot of them had friends who had cows. The first dairy in Flagstaff that I can remember was Garing. They had the first Flagstaff ________. (FM and LM discuss location of diary.) It was out west. Where is the Flagstaff Dairy located? Now, that might have been the original but I just thought of that now; west Garing was the first dairy, and then Matsons had a dairy, and the Johnsons had a dairy just east of town not too far. There were three dairies which supplied.... A LOT of people went to friends who had a cow in the back yard - it was all right to have a cow - and get a bucket of milk from them.
LOIS METZ: I remember Fred's mother kept chickens.
FRED METZ: Yeah. Everybody had chickens or rabbits in the back yard. That's what you ate.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: I guess it wasn't big enough for it to bother it, really.
LOIS METZ: It didn't disturb anybody.
FRED METZ: Everybody kept 'em, and that was part of what you had to live on. You had to grow your own food, you know.
LOIS METZ: But of course, I can remember, too, when I first started housekeeping up there, the vegetables were practically nonexistent - shriveled up little beets and carrots and things. And that was one of the reasons nobody ever had salad. (tape turned off an on)
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Was this because they couldn't get 'em in from anywhere?
FRED METZ: No, they weren't available, they didn't have equipment for shipping them, for one thing.
FRED METZ: Everybody grew their own.
LOIS METZ: They grew 'em in the summertime and canned what they could. So then you just got along as best you could. Of course the canned fruits and vegetables were an ENORMOUS department of the grocery stores then. And now, they've got a few little shelves of canned things.
FRED METZ: They're frozen or fresh now.
LOIS METZ: And of course nobody ever heard of anything [frozen?].
FRED METZ: Everybody had a root cellar. Out in our back yard we had a root cellar about four feet deep, lined with ties, in boxes all around, bins about two feet square, and that was all full of fine screened sand from River de Flag, and you raised your potatoes, or like we bought all of our potatoes and cabbage and turnips and everything from Old Man Michelbach, with his place up on the Peaks. And then you brought that down, and you buried all of that in the sand, and you went down there, and you had your turnips and you had cabbage, and you had potatoes, and you had sweet potatoes. Anything like that was all buried in the sand and you just dug the sand out and brought it up and used it, 'cause you needed it. You bought fresh potatoes, but most people, because they were so expensive, they raised their own. I won't say everybody, but prit near everybody had a little garden patch.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you have an ice man that would deliver ice?
FRED METZ: Yes, I used to deliver ice. During my summer vacations, one of my jobs was ice delivery from Babbitts'. The only ice plant was Babbitts' ice plant there, where they made their own electricity, you know. That was a back-breaking job, all day long, lifting. You'd go to these old ice boxes and the woman would be gone, she'd just have a sign hung out there, how much she wanted: ten pounds, fifteen, or twenty five. You'd have to go open the lid and take out all the milk and stuff that she'd had in there next to a little chunk of ice. Put that, and put the new chunk in, and then break the little piece around and put back the stuff. Oh, it was one hell of a job! To deliver twenty-five pounds of ice to many places would take you a half-hour. You know, with what you had to do. They were inadequate, the damned ice pan always ran over, all over the floor. Most of 'em had 'em out on the back porch and had a hole drilled through, with a funnel and a hose there to divert the water under the house. But it was, uh…
KRISTINE PRENNACE: You got milk delivered every day (
FRED METZ: Yes.)
KRISTINE PRENNACE: eggs delivered quite often. Things like that. Didn't you shop almost every day?
FRED METZ: No. Oh, no, most people shopped once a week in those days.
LOIS METZ: Well, in those days, though, they DID shop a lot oftener, because the refrigeration was inadequate, completely.
FRED METZ: For perishables, you had… that’s right. There was no refrigeration for years and years and years. Things spoiled.
LOIS METZ: And of course in Flagstaff it was fairly brisk, and if you had a back porch where you could keep things, that helped. But you couldn't buy, like we buy now, shop twice a month, or anything like that, (
FRED METZ: You put everything in the freezer, you know.)
LOIS METZ: because you just plain didn't have the kind of storage to help keep it.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: If you kept meat for two or three days, that was it.
FRED METZ: That was it. And you see, everybody had their own chickens, and several people had turkeys, and they'd come over and come around during the season. The only time you had turkey was on Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's, and they'd come around and take your order, and they'd deliver it the day before Christmas, fresh turkeys - not frozen, there was no such a thing. And chickens, several people on the outskirts of town, some of these farmers and ranchers raised a lot of chickens, and they came in every Saturday morning, and if you were on their list, they'd come by and leave you a chicken or a dozen eggs or a pound of fresh butter, or two pounds.
LOIS METZ: There were quite a few farms up on the Peaks. Of course they weren't in operation in the winter at all, but during the summer you could get fresh vegetables.
FRED METZ: We had one woman up there on the Peaks, she and her husband, every week they brought a pound of fresh churned country butter, a couple dozen eggs, and a quart jar full of cream that was so heavy you had to spoon it out, and maybe a half-gallon or a gallon of milk, because it was so fresh. And if you wanted a chicken next week, "Bring us a chicken." And they were always a good size, three-and-a-half, four-pound fryers, you know, big ones, had some meat on 'em. But most were like my mother, she had twenty-five or thirty chickens in the back yard all the time. We didn't have to buy any chickens. We bought turkeys.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: You had your eggs every day.
FRED METZ: Yeah, we had a few eggs every day. Most of the time it was only - sometimes the chickens would take a time when they weren't laying, and then we'd have to buy eggs.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Yeah, that's the way you got your food.
FRED METZ: That's right.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Can you think of anything else?
FRED METZ: No.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: We've covered so much.
FRED METZ: I imagine after you leave, I'll start thinking of all kinds of things, but I think that concludes it. How about you, dear?
LOIS METZ: I can't think of anything else at the moment.
[END OF INTERVIEW]

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FLAGSTAFF PUBLIC LIBRARY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Fred and Lois Metz
Interview number NAU.OH.28.74
Fred and Lois Metz, who were long-time residents of Flagstaff. Mr. Metz’s family moved to Flagstaff in 1905 and Mrs. Metz’s grandparents, Judge and Mrs. Perkins, were some of the original settlers in the Flagstaff area. Interview conducted by Kristine Prennace on July 14, 1976. Transcribed by Jardee Transcription, February 2000.
This is an interview with Mr. and Mrs. Fred Metz, who were long-time residents of Flagstaff. Mr. Metz's family moved to Flagstaff in 1905 and Mrs. Metz's grandparents, Judge and Mrs. Perkins, were some of the original settlers in the Flagstaff area. The interview is being conducted on July 14, 1976, at the Metzes' home, which is located at 109 Van Deren’s Avenue, in Sedona, by Kristine Prennace representing the Flagstaff City-Coconino County Public Library.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Mr. Metz, when and where were you born?
FRED METZ: I was born in Kilburn, Wisconsin, on June 10, 1899.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: And who were your parents?
FRED METZ: My parents, John Metz, and my mother's maiden name was Julia Hollverson.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Where did they come from originally?
FRED METZ: My father came from Germany. He came over with five brothers and sisters - three sisters, and he was one of two brothers - five children. Their father brought them from Germany, and they settled in Wisconsin, bought a BEAUTIFUL big farm there, right along the Wisconsin River. They left Germany so that the two younger boys wouldn't have to go into the service. You know, the kaiser conscripted all young men, so their father brought the whole family to Wisconsin, so the boys would NOT have to serve in the kaiser's army.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Your mother also came from Germany?
FRED METZ: She was from Norway. She's Norwegian, Hollverson. Her family lived there in Kilburn, Wisconsin.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: What did her father do?
FRED METZ: He was a farmer. That was all farming area around there. Very beautiful farm. There were a great many Germans and Norwegians in that area; and dairies and dairy cows and things like that - cheese factories.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Right. So when did they come to Flagstaff then?
FRED METZ: My mother and father moved to Flagstaff… It was so easy to remember, my father brought my mother from the east, due to my mother's health. She had consumption. We arrived in Flagstaff on the fifth day of May 1905 - the fifth day, the fifth month, and the fifth year, which is easy to remember, isn't it? Very fortunate.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: So you moved because of ...
FRED METZ: ... my mother's health. And she lived to be how many years, dear?
LOIS METZ: About seventy-six.
FRED METZ: About seventy-six, and she was supposed to die within a year!
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Now, what did your father do when he came to Flagstaff?
FRED METZ: When my father came to Flagstaff… in Kilburn, Wisconsin, he owned a small barber shop, and he came to Flagstaff as a barber with Mr. Frank Leslie, who owned the nicest barber shop in Flagstaff. My father worked for him about three years, and then engaged in the sheep business. His first partner in the sheep business enterprise was Leo Verkamp. He was with my father for many years. Now, my father acquired his sheep outfit, he and Mr. Verkamp, from a very, very nice gentleman by the name of....
LOIS METZ: I can't help you.
FRED METZ: Well, it begins with "H." He was the managing operator of the drilling enterprise that was being conducted at (
LOIS METZ: Meteor Crater.)
FRED METZ: Meteor Crater. He had these sheep on the side. Well, in the early days, he owned a stock company. He went east at regular periods when he ran out of money and was able to raise more money. He was a very good salesman and publicity man. He'd come then, back there to Meteor Crater where they were drilling.
LOIS METZ: Wasn’t his name Hollsinger?
FRED METZ: Hollsinger was his name - Mr. Hollsinger. And he kept the people in the East on pins and needles all the time, telling them that they were just about to hit the meteor that was supposed to have been buried. In fact, he'd even come with tales of how the drill had hit this material which was the hardest known substance in the world, and the drills would be shattered. But the fact is, there never WAS any meteor down in. The meteor exploded, and as a boy, when I was there with my father with the sheep, I picked fragments up as far away as fifteen miles from the site. It was just completely exploded. But he was a wonderful gentleman, and he was wantin' to move and retire to Pasadena with his family, so my father and Mr. Verkamp bought his sheep outfit.
Now, my father was in that area about three years with the sheep. Then he moved and he got range just south of where the present site of Rogers Lake is. And that was his headquarters for many years, until some of the larger sheep outfits and the larger cattle outfits finally drove all the small sheep and cattle ranchers off - just like the big chain groceries are doing to the small groceries today. So my father lost his range land there, and had to move to Stonemans Lake where he was for several years. And then they took that range land, because some of the bigger outfits that wanted it and acquired it. So he, like about twenty other sheepmen that one year, just sold out in disgust because they couldn't make it with this constant moving.
Now, my father's place there, south of Rogers Lake, I have a letter here from the United States Department of Agriculture, dated January 30, 1976, in reply to a letter that Mrs. Metz wrote.
LOIS METZ: In 1962. That note wasn't in the seventies.
FRED METZ: No, I beg your pardon, this letter is dated January 30, 1962, and that's in reply to a letter that Mrs. Metz wrote while we were still living in Flagstaff, about this mountain that's named after my father. Here's the letter. It says, "Mrs. Fred W. Metz, 1774 First Avenue, San Francisco, California. Dear Mrs. Metz, this is in reply to your letter of January 19, concerning Metz Mountain. This mountain is located in Section 11, Township 20 North, Range 5 East, which as you will recall is approximately three miles southeast of Rogers Lake. Metz Mountain is shown as such on our detailed maps and is a well-known landmark to all of us and to the public. LeBarron Hill is one-and-a-half miles south of Rogers Lake and three miles east of Metz Mountain. Mr. Roland Rowdy, former supervisor of the Coconino National Forest is now stationed in Washington, D.C. He will be returning to Flagstaff within two weeks to make an inspection of our work. We shall extend your greetings to him. Thanks for your letter and interest in the National Forest Program. Sincerely yours, J.A. Cravens, Forest Supervisor."
We wanted to establish where the mountain was. I knew but I have a large....
LOIS METZ: We saw some publicity from someplace, and I thought… I think it was apropos from LeBarron Hill. So I wrote and asked 'em about Metz Mountain. I said, "Has Mr. LeBarron taken our mountain?" (laughter) And it seems that he has a hill, too.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Mr. LeBarron is another one of those small sheep outfits that was forced to go out of business due to the confiscation of their grazing land.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: About how many sheep did your father run?
FRED METZ: About 3,500.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: And that was a very small herd at that time.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Between 3,500 and 4,000. There usually was about 1,500 to what they called a band. He had two separate bands of about 1,700-1,800 sheep each. That's about the size most of the small outfits were made up of.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Seems like a lot. How large were the LARGE outfits then?
FRED METZ: Well, as the larger outfits started buying up, they never had them in bands larger than that, but they would own several sheep outfits all over the area, you see, and they got all the choice grazing lands, through their influence with the Forest Service.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: So they might possibly own as many as 10,000?
FRED METZ: Oh, easy! Ten or fifteen thousand. It was the same way with the small cow outfits. That same year there were maybe fifteen small cow outfits went broke because their land was taken away from 'em for the big cattle outfits. It was a terrible thing to happen to the community, because when the town was patronized by all of these small independent sheep outfits, all these small independent cattle outfits, it was a lots better town than with one or two big outfits owning the whole thing, you see.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you tell me what your father did after he lost his sheep?
FRED METZ: After he lost his sheep, for a couple of years there was a Republican administration in the state here at that time. Thomas Campbell was governor, which was almost unheard of. This was Democratic for so many years. My father had all of Coconino County with the state game warden. He was appointed state game warden in Northern Arizona, and he had that position for a couple of years. Then after that he worked for the Flagstaff Lumber and Timber Company, which is over there where the Saginaw is now.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Where the Holiday Inn....
FRED METZ: No, no, the Holiday Inn was the Arizona Lumber and Timber Company. That's where I worked as a boy. I fired on the railroad there, just before World War I. The other one was over east of town. Originally, that mill was started by Mr. J.C. Dolan. He later was associated with Riordans in the Arizona Lumber and Timber. But the mill over there was the Flagstaff Lumber and Timber Company, and the nickname was the Flim Flam Company. (laughter)
KRISTINE PRENNACE: What did your mother do these years after you moved to Flagstaff?
FRED METZ: She was a homemaker.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: How many brothers and sisters did you have?
FRED METZ: I had one brother and one sister.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: What were their names?
FRED METZ: My brother's name was John Metz, who has since passed away. He lived in Prescott. My sister's name was Helen Metz. She married Mr. Jack Young. She had two children - both of them live in Flagstaff. John Young has an insurance business out on Cedar, Farmers Insurance. My niece, my sister's daughter, is Cathy Spangler. Both she and her husband are schoolteachers in the Flagstaff area. Mrs. Spangler, my niece, has two lovely daughters and a son. My nephew, Johnny Young, has three delightful daughters. Johnny Young's wife was the former Mary Todd of the famous Todds Lodge up here in Oak Creek, which is now Garlands. The Todds started that in the early days. That's one of the most famous and the nicest places to stay in Arizona in the summertime. Mary Young, I think, was the second daughter, and my nephew John married her. We had them all here last Sunday with the girls for an outing - a delightful time.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Okay, why don't I ask Mrs. Metz now about her family background? When and where were you born?
LOIS METZ: I was born in Kansas City, Missouri. And you know I didn't live there very long, or I'd call it "Missourah." (laughter) And I was born January 31, 1902.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Who were your parents?
LOIS METZ: My father was Fred H. Perkins. He was Judge Perkins' oldest son. My mother was Inez Philly. Her father was city engineer about that time for Kansas City.
FRED METZ: Tell her what he later did.
LOIS METZ: Well, he did that first.
FRED METZ: Oh, first, _________.
LOIS METZ: He was an engineer, and he was the engineer in charge of the first railroad that was built to Laredo, the city in Mexico. My mother was a babe in arms when this project started, and they lived along the railroad as it was built, and my mother learned to speak Spanish before she did English, because of the household help they had, their nursemaid and so forth. I think she must have been six or seven when they moved back to the States for a short while and then went back again. My grandfather spent a good deal of his time in Mexico. He built the Guanajuato Farm Electric Company in Guanajuato. And I can't spell Guanajuato, in case you need to know. (laughter)
KRISTINE PRENNACE: That's what I was going to ask! Well, we'll find out.
LOIS METZ: And MY family came to Arizona, my father was a mining engineer. My grandfather - there were four children of us at the time we were living in Oregon - and my grandfather lured my father down to Arizona to help out with the sheep business. He also had a small sheep outfit on the side of his law practice and being judge and so forth. Mother was very tired of raising her family all by herself, so she sort of chimed in and encouraged him to come down. My father bought a ranch down in the Salt River Valley, where Grandfather could come and headquarter for his sheep in the wintertime. We lived on this ranch, oh, eight or nine years, I think. But we came to Flagstaff first, and it must have been about 1908. We lived there a year or eighteen months or something like that before the family moved to Peoria.
FRED METZ: Tell 'em about what's there in Peoria, where the ranch was.
LOIS METZ: Oh, where our ranch house was, is where the buildings are for the Glendale Airport. The ranch itself was 160 acres there, and probably all of that's in the airport now. I was so surprised when we drove down Olive Avenue. That didn’t used to be Olive Avenue - they had it named for a lateral, and I can't remember what the lateral name was. Most of those streets in the outskirts in the valley were named for the laterals. The roads came down the canals and the small size canals that came off of the big canals were called laterals. So most of those streets were named for laterals, and now they all have names of their own.
FRED METZ: Lateral 34 or Lateral 82, that was the street, instead of the names.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: So you were what… about six or seven when you came here?
LOIS METZ: Yeah. I went to school here. I started to school in Williams. The headquarters for Grandfather's sheep outfit was out of Williams, and his YOUNGEST son ran the sheep. He was Warren Perkins. At first we settled in Williams for a short time, and I started to school in Williams, in the second grade. And then they decided that it would be better for us to move up to Flagstaff, because my father was gone so much, it would be nice for Mother to be closer to Grandfather. Shortly after we got to Flagstaff, I came down with measles, and pretty soon everybody in Flagstaff had the measles because they'd been having it in Williams. I transported them from Williams to Flagstaff.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Now, where did your grandfather live? Do you remember what street he lived on or anything in Flagstaff?
LOIS METZ: Yes. At first he lived in the old Gosney house, which is still there. It's been done over several times. I'm trying to think, the Stalls owned it and lived in it for many years. He was the man down at the railroad.
FRED METZ: He was the agent for the Santa Fe.
LOIS METZ: I'm not familiar enough with the streets. It was on the corner of Birch and the one that's west of Sitgreaves.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Humphrey?
LOIS METZ: No, Humphrey is the other way.
FRED METZ: Humphrey is east.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Okay, Park might be the name of it?
LOIS METZ: It COULD be. I'm just not familiar enough with the streets. So-and-So's house was the way we always designated it in those days. And then they lived up on the hill next to the Pollock home for a number of years. Eventually, they lived over on Agassiz.
FRED METZ: First they lived right there. Isn't that where the five-and-ten-cent store is now?
LOIS METZ: Yeah, they lived in the old Sisson house, that's right.
FRED METZ: That was next to the old Arizona Central Bank.
LOIS METZ: The old Sisson house is where the Firestone store is right now. The Arizona Central Bank was right on the corner. And that's where they were living when I came to Flagstaff to go to the Normal School. And I lived downtown with them, I didn't stay at the dormitory.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Okay, maybe we can move into talking about your schooling, both of you. I think we'll do it that way. I don't care who starts. You went to Emerson?
LOIS METZ: I just went to Emerson this one year before my family… after having brought the measles, then my family moved to Peoria. I went to school down there in Peoria in a one-room school. I even remember the teacher's name. Her name was Mrs. Rambeau. Oh, there must have been maybe twenty-five or thirty pupils in the school, all grades.
FRED METZ: In one room.
LOIS METZ: Yeah. And when I went there, I guess I was in the second grade, or maybe I was in the third by that time. Whatever grade it was, they didn't have it, so they put me in the one behind it. They put me back in the second grade. And then the next year, they had a third grade, but in the meantime, I'd been listening to everything else, and I didn't need the third-grade work, so they moved me on up into the fourth grade. I got through with everybody else, even if I'd been put back one year.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Yeah, I imagine there's a lot of flexibility.
LOIS METZ: Yes. And eventually I graduated from that grammar school. By then, there were two rooms, and there were nine of us in my graduating class. To kind of brag a little, I was valedictorian. (laughter) Then the following year was the year that I came up to the Normal School, because there was no high school. And at that time, the Normal School gave high school work. Everybody in Northern Arizona, where there were no high schools, came to the Normal School and got their high school training.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Okay, we'll go back to YOUR grammar school education.
FRED METZ: Well, now, my first school experience, I went to the Nativity School for two years. Do you know where that health food store is now, right across from the Cath… That was the old school. When they built the new church over there, they moved it across the street. But that was the old schoolhouse. So I was two years there, and then I went to the Emerson School. My folks bought the property directly across the street from Emerson School on Aspen. I completed my schooling there, was in my second year - that's the eighth grade - was in my second year at the Normal School, when World War I broke out, and I went away to the service then. (tape turned off and on)
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Why don't we go back to Emerson? Do you remember any of your schoolteachers there?
FRED METZ: Oh, yes!
LOIS METZ: Miss Green.
FRED METZ: Miss Green. We both had Miss Green. She was later Mrs. Paul Coffin, from the Wilson and Coffin Plumbing Company. Such a wonderful, wonderful lady. Then later, we had two or three other teachers, but none of them impressed me as much as Miss Green did. Then the main one was one I had for a couple of years, and one who was my teacher when I graduated, and her name was Mrs. Bertha Kennedy. And here she is with these big wheels on page 22 with Mrs. Al Doyle. They were neighbors, you see. And she's on page 22 of Flagstaff 1876-1976. Bertha Kennedy had a daughter and a son, Johnny Kennedy. I lost track of them over the years. But Bertha Kennedy was a marvelous teacher.
LOIS METZ: She was the principal of the school.
FRED METZ: Principal of the school later, and everybody loved her. She just was....
KRISTINE PRENNACE: She was married at the time that you had her?
FRED METZ: No, she was a widow.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: So that was how she kind of qualified, because there weren't very many married teachers.
FRED METZ: No, she was a widow.
LOIS METZ: If you were married, you were automatically OUT!
FRED METZ: Yeah, she was a widow, and a great friend of Mrs. Al Doyle's. Of course they were neighbors. The Kennedy house was the first house south of.... I've got it right here. Here's the Greenlaw house and then the Bertha Kennedy home. The first house south of the Greenlaw home was Bertha Kennedy's home.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: What street was that on?, if you can remember that.
FRED METZ: That's looking south on Leroux Street in 1913.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: It must have been like from the top of it.
FRED METZ: They're up at the top, yeah, and they're looking south. There's the Weatherford Hotel down there below. Here's Bertha Kennedy - I marked it on there - Bertha Kennedy's home.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you have any classmates that you remember particularly well?
FRED METZ: Yes. In our graduating class there was Albert Santalianas, the only Mexican boy, who was without question one of the most brilliant young men I ever knew when it came to figures. He could go up to the blackboard, and they could call like "5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12," give him ten figures across that way, and a line of twelve different figures, draw a line and write the answer. Just as soon as he drew the line, he could write the answer.
LOIS METZ: Early-day computer! (laughter)
FRED METZ: Ella Hoffman was another classmate, of the Hoffman family. Minnie Benson. Sarah Herman, whose father and mother ran one of Flagstaff's first and nicest clothing stores, dry goods store. There was also Elmer Jackson, a close friend of mine. There was Gaston Aubineau, A U B I N E A U. His father was mayor of Flagstaff in 1898. There was Lucille Elmore, who was the beauty of the time, had the most GORGEOUS hair. She had braids that hung down her head to her knees in back. She had two braids, and each braid was at least three inches in diameter. You never saw such a one - she was a BEAUTIFUL girl. Oh, yes! my good friend Ralph McGoogin, who lived right at the underpass. (tape turned off and on)
LOIS METZ: Was Ralph Elliott in that?
FRED METZ: No, no.
LOIS METZ: He came later?
FRED METZ: He came later. And I think that's what constituted the graduating class of that year. I forgot what year that was.
[END TAPE 1, SIDE 1; BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE 2]
FRED METZ: _________ and went to the office to get paid. And the old office still stands there, right across from the Holiday Inn, that tufastone building. In those days, there was no such thing as currency. You got paid in gold and silver. Nobody had any currency in this country. And I can remember going in there and getting two bright, shiny twenty-dollar gold pieces and a couple of five-dollar gold pieces. And it was really an experience to carry THAT kind of money around. There was only silver and gold, there was no paper money.
LOIS METZ: And certainly no checks.
FRED METZ: No checks a'tall. Well, then the next summer I went up and enrolled up at the Northern Arizona Normal School. That summer I again worked out at the lumber company, but I worked on the railroad, the logging road - I was fireman on the engine. Then I put in another summer like that, and then we went into World War I, the country, and I enlisted in the Navy, was sent to San Diego, California, where I went through the boot camp, as they called it. I went into the Signal Corps and I was transferred from there, after about four months, to Norfolk, Virginia, where I completed school, quite an intensive training. I was put into the submarine service and shipped up to New London, Connecticut, and was getting accustomed to submarine life, and learning something about the signal end of it, particularly aboard a submarine, when the war ended. I was kept around there for about another thirty days without going to sea. The war was over, they held all of the ships in, and the boats. I was discharged then, and came back to Flagstaff.
Jobs were very scarce. I was able, through the influence of Mr. C.B. Wilson, Sr., who Lois' grandfather had brought out to be his law partner in the early days, he was also the attorney for the Santa Fe Railroad. I got a job up at the Grand Canyon with the Fred Harvey people, driving their touring cars. They used the great big old Pearce-Arrow seven-passenger cars with the headlights out on the fenders. I was up there for about a year-and-a-half. That's where I was really able to save some money. I made a hundred dollars a month and my board and room, and up there, no place to spend a dime, so I saved it all. I sent my check down to Flagstaff to the bank. After about eighteen months of that, I had a nice little nest egg, and I decided I wanted to continue my education, and I moved to Phoenix and enrolled in the Lamson Business College. I spent a year-and-a-half there, graduated, was married the day after I was graduated, moved to Flagstaff the next day, was hired by Babbitt Brothers as assistant cashier to Mr. Jakle, Mr. Jakle, Sr.
I was there for about a year-and-a-half, and a friend of my father's was elected county recorder, Howard Marine. He asked me to be his deputy. I was his deputy recorder for about a year-and-a-half, and I tired of that, I couldn't see any future in politics. So I put in my application with the Standard Oil Company in California and was accepted. They brought me back to Phoenix, and I went through the stations there, as a trainee. I was moved to Tucson - Mrs. Metz and I moved to Tucson. After working on a station there for six months, I was put in charge of all the Standard Oil service stations IN Tucson, which at that time they were run by the company, numbered about six stations. So I was there with them for several years.
Mr. John H. Cameron of the Cameron Oil Company, Ardmore, Oklahoma, used to spend his winters there in the Santa Rita Hotel. He'd walk over and visit with me, and he finally propositioned me once to go to Oklahoma with him. He had about twelve service stations across Oklahoma, but they didn't know anything about giving service. He wanted his stations all remodeled and run like the Standard Oil's. So I decided to go with him.
I resigned, he asked me to go up to Flagstaff and see my parents, Lois and I… and then come back within about a week and we'd go to Oklahoma then with he and his wife. He had his chauffeur and a big Cadillac car and wanted us to ride over with him and ship our household things. While we were in Flagstaff visiting my people, I got a telephone call one evening. Mrs. Cameron was calling me from the Santa Rita Hotel in Tucson. He had dropped dead in the lobby of a heart attack. So that was the termination of my employment with him.
So then I came around Flagstaff for a while, then I moved down to Phoenix and I went to work for the water users, Salt River Valley Water Users, as a clerk in the accounting department. I was there about a year-and-a-half, and I went over to the City Hall in Phoenix. I worked there as clerk and assistant chief clerk for two years, and was made chief clerk. Then I realized that that was again politics, and I wanted none of it.
LOIS METZ: He was chief clerk in the water department.
FRED METZ: Yeah, I was chief clerk in the water department in Phoenix. So finally I put in my application with National Cash Register Company and was accepted. I wanted sales, but before you could go into sales, you had to have a year-and-a-half in their office. I went in as assistant office manager, and in about eight months I was made office manager. At the end of eighteen months I was accepted into the sales organization, sent back to the factory at Dayton for some special training. The result was I spent thirty-five years with the National Cash Register Company. I spent ten of it up around Flagstaff. I was given that territory. I had everything in the state north of Wickenburg. I headquartered at Flagstaff, 'cause we knew everybody.
World War II broke out, and the company let over half of the salesmen go. They had around 1,900 salesmen, and they kept 800 of us. I was one of the fortunate ones, and I was sent to San Francisco, where we lived for almost twenty-five years. I had a couple of very severe heart attacks, and had to take early retirement. And in 1963, we moved here to Sedona, and have lived in this little house ever since June 10, my birthday, 1963. And here we are.
One of the things we moved here for is close proximity to what remaining relatives we had in Flagstaff. We have two nephews and their families here in Sedona - two sons of Lois' sister. It felt more like home, plus I always considered this the finest area in the United States. After we first retired, we spent three years traveling all over the United States, trying to make up our mind where we would settle. We knew that San Francisco was no place to retire, so we decided on Sedona, and we moved here, and we've been here ever since, and don't plan to leave - we WOULDN'T leave. We have many friends here. Of course we have a very, very few of our old-time friends in Flagstaff - they're very few and far between. We do still have some family there, which is nice to go and see. We go up every Friday to do our shopping, and we have lunch either with one or the other. We take our lunch with us and have it at their house.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Who are some of your friends who are still living in Flagstaff, that you knew years ago?
FRED METZ: Yes. Well, Mr. and Mrs. Pat Hogan, Ernest Pat Hogan, whose father was one of the old, old pioneers of Flagstaff, Dan Hogan. He was one of Teddy Roosevelt's original Rough Riders in the Spanish-American War. Of the old-time Flagstaff people that are left, there's Howard Yost, who was in the post office for many years. And there's his sister, Mrs. George Falder, FALDER. The Falder family were great friends of my mother and father. There's Orinn Compton, who lives in Sun City a bigger part of the time, still maintains a home there.
LOIS METZ: The two Greenlaw girls.
FRED METZ: Two Greenlaw girls.
LOIS METZ: Mrs. Beamer and ...
FRED METZ: ... Mrs. Drain. And there's Tommy Long. He's one of the early - not back as far as Mrs. Beamer and Mrs. Drain. Do you know of any others, honey?
LOIS METZ: I'm thinking.
FRED METZ: Of course Henry Giclas. He and his dear wife are very good friends, but they're almost as old as we are, not quite. But they're a very, very wonderful couple. There's a FEW old-timers left....
LOIS METZ: There aren't all that many left in Flagstaff. Lots of them in Cottonwood. A few of us in Sedona.
FRED METZ: The really old, old, old-timers, not too many of us. So many of 'em all passed away. Pretty near ALL of my classmates are passed away - my graduation from Emerson School - except Minnie Benson. And I think Sarah Herman, who lives over in Los Angeles. Ralph McGoogin still is alive. He lives in Long Beach. I've lost track of Albert Santalianas, who I would love to know where he is. But so many of them are gone.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Well, let's ask Mrs. Metz, when did you start going to Normal School?
LOIS METZ: It had to be in 1915.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you meet Mr. Metz those years?
LOIS METZ: That year. We were in two classes together.
FRED METZ: (inaudible)
LOIS METZ: (chuckles) We were in algebra class, and we were seated alphabetically. His name was Metz, and mine was Perkins, and there was somebody between us.
FRED METZ: Morris.
LOIS METZ: Morris. And he wasn't there very much.
FRED METZ: L. Morris.
LOIS METZ: Elmer Morris. And then we were in - they had a spelling class, and we were in spelling class together. That was how we met, when we were seated more or less side-by-side, and we were never formally introduced, of course.
FRED METZ: Didn't need it, did we?
LOIS METZ: No, not from then. You just said hi to whoever sat beside you.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: How did a young man go about asking a lady out in those days?
LOIS METZ: Well, now, let me think. He was going with somebody else for a good deal of that year. I'm not sure I could remember. I think the first actual date that we had, though, we went to the movies.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: At the Orpheum?
FRED METZ: Uh-huh, at the Orpheum.
LOIS METZ: Yeah. And that was the year that they had that terrific snow, and the Orpheum caved in. I went back to Phoenix - we always went back and forth by train in those days - and I went back to Phoenix for the Christmas vacation. And when I came back, the snow was there, and I can remember I came a day early or a day late, whichever. My grandparents weren't expecting me, so I wasn't met. And they had cleared the paths on the sidewalks just wide enough for an individual to walk. I had my suitcase, and I remember I had to carry it out in front of me like this. I couldn't carry it down to the side. I didn't have very far to walk, just up to where my grandparents lived there, at the Firestone store.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Right.
LOIS METZ: So I remember there were a number of things going on over at the school. And since both of us lived downtown, he'd say, "Well, can I pick you up, and we'll go to thus-and-so, or whatever?" So we walked over. Of course everybody walked everywhere.
FRED METZ: In December they had sixty-six and three-tenths inches of snowfall.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: In one month!
FRED METZ: And then in January, on top of it, they had fifty-four point four.
LOIS METZ: Yeah, that was a very snowy year. You had to wait until the trail was broken on some of those mornings to walk over to the college, over to the Normal School.
FRED METZ: There was a total of 120.7 inches.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: They had to clear the roads by hand?
FRED METZ: By hand. You see the men working there?
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Yeah.
FRED METZ: And I worked in that crowd as a boy, 'cause there was no school and they paid us twenty-five cents an hour to shovel snow.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh, they did pay you?
FRED METZ: Yeah, twenty-five cents an hour. Worked ten hours and made $2.50.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: That was a little bit more money than it is today.
LOIS METZ: Yeah, that actually WAS $2.50.
FRED METZ: That WAS money!
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Okay, did you finish high school at the Normal School?
LOIS METZ: No, I didn't, I only went that one year, and then I went to school in Glendale for one year. There was a high school in Glendale. I had a horse and buggy, I drove myself. It was about five or six miles, and I drove to school with a horse and buggy. Then the following year, my family moved to Phoenix. I graduated from high school in Phoenix, at Phoenix Union, when it was the only high school in Phoenix. I graduated in 1920. When he came down to go to Lamson Business School, we picked up where we left off, and we decided then that we'd be married, as he said. The day after he graduated we were married.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Was that 1921?
LOIS METZ: That was 1922.
FRED METZ: We've now been married fifty-four years the first day of June. That's a long time.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: It sure is. Especially anymore.
FRED METZ: Yeah, most people don't reach that.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you know Dr. Blome?
FRED METZ: Oh, personally. Wonderful gentleman. The thing that’s so sad about Dr. Blome, with his great ability, when the war broke out, because his name was Blome and he was German. There were many people in Flagstaff who, of course, immediately thought he was a German sympathizer, which he was not. But there was a couple of men on the school board who just couldn't rest until they forced his resignation. He moved to Pasadena and died of a broken heart in about eighteen months. He was one of the most scholarly men, one of the finest administrators. It was a sad thing for the school when he was forced....
LOIS METZ: In that First World War, there was so much bitterness _____ toward the Germans. Of course Fred and I were friends, and I hesitated to say my friend's name is Mr. Metz, because the feeling WAS so intense.
FRED METZ: Oh, it was terrible!
LOIS METZ: I know that the antagonism wasn't nearly as noticeable in the Second World War as it was in the First, although they weren't friends, by any means. But there wasn't this bitterness, to where they changed the name of hamburger to "liberty steak," and a few things like that. All of those are ridiculous.
FRED METZ: Yeah! And they changed the name of German fried potatoes to cottage fried potatoes. Isn't that ridiculous?!
LOIS METZ: Considering how many people of German background there are in this century, it’s silly.
FRED METZ: Flagstaff had many German people. The old-timers, Minnie Michelbach, Yost, Metz.
LOIS METZ: Hochderffer.
FRED METZ: Hockderffers. A LOT of good German people there, but they were staunch Americans. The reason I never learned to speak German, when my father's father brought them over from Germany, he wouldn't let them speak German around the house anymore. He wanted them to be Americanized, and made everybody learn to speak English, and my father continued the same thing. He would never speak German to my mother or around the house.
LOIS METZ: And incidentally, he learned, with virtually no accent.
FRED METZ: No accent.
LOIS METZ: No accent. And he was in his early teens when he learned English.
FRED METZ: He was about fourteen when they brought him over, and they usually had to go in the service about fourteen over there.
So it was a sad, sad affair. Now, Dr. Blome had two nice children. His son was Harold Blome.
LOIS METZ: No, his son was Jack Blome.
FRED METZ: Jack was a nickname. The daughter's name was....
LOIS METZ: Nora.
FRED METZ: Both of them DELIGHTFUL people. Mrs. Blome was one of the sweetest persons you ever knew. And to have that type of a thing happen to such a lovely family was a sad, sad thing. Flagstaff lost the finest educator that it ever had.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Now, who took his place then?
LOIS METZ: I wasn't there, I can't tell you.
FRED METZ: I'll think of it in a minute. He was from Winslow.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: It wasn’t Gammage, was it?
FRED METZ: No, Gammage was after. THERE was a wonderful gentleman. Mr. Gammage was.... His name began with "P," the man that came up from Winslow. He was only a very short time. That era, at that time, there was a great deal of politics involved in school administration. They'd appoint a school board up there, and the board… what did they call them in those days? What they still call 'em. It's not a board.
LOIS METZ: Board of Regents?
FRED METZ: Board of Regents. They'd appoint a Board of Regents, and all kinds of heckling and trouble brewing constantly. I know one or two instances, particularly with Dr. Blome, two brothers attending the school were so obnoxious in everything they were doing, and he finally just told them they couldn't come back to school any longer, and their father was on the Board of Regents, and that helped in his dismissal, you see. Personalities like that. Both the boys should have been taken out and hung, as far as their desirability as students.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Do you remember the Normal School library?
FRED METZ: Very much! That's where our romance blossomed. It was in the two towers of Old Main. Both towers were kind of connected between. That's where the library was. Isn’t that right? And that's where we used to go on the pretense of looking up something, and got a chance to visit a little more.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you have to do a lot of research for your schoolwork then?
FRED METZ: Yes, quite a bit.
LOIS METZ: Well, actually, there wasn't all that much in high school.
FRED METZ: No, there wasn't, but they gave us some to familiarize us with what to do, you know.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Uh-huh. Was it a large library then?
LOIS METZ: Comparatively, no. I can't remember, there was that big area, the two towers and in between. And then I think there was one room around....
FRED METZ: On the west wall that ran down quite a ways.
LOIS METZ: But I wasn't all that interested in libraries. At that time, I didn't realize that fifty-five years later I'd be asked about it! (laughter) I wasn't paying all that much attention!
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Okay. Were there any special activities at the Normal School that you can remember real well, like a celebration, or I don't know, just anything outside of classwork?
FRED METZ: Well, the only thing was the basketball team and the football team and the baseball team. That was the activities. That's the only three. I played baseball. In those days, when the girls wore the bloomers, you know. The football team, I forget what year it was. I guess it was '16. They were the champions of the state.
LOIS METZ: And practically every boy in school at that time was on the football team, because there weren't all that many _________. (laughter)
FRED METZ: In those days, you see, we kinda had it to ourselves. There was an average, say, of 150-200 girls goin' to school, and only 50 boys, because no boys were taking training as teachers in those days - none of them.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh, right!
FRED METZ: So we became very arrogant with what we had to pick from, 150 girls. That's about three girls for every boy. I can remember at the dances, many of the girls had to dance with each other, because there were not enough boys to go around. And they held a lot of school dances. It was very nice. Everything was very proper.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Lots of chaperons?
FRED METZ: A lot of chaperons. The matrons from the girls' dormitories acted as chaperons. Everybody toed the mark, they didn't put up with any foolishness at all. You were just kicked out of school, and that's all there was to it. They didn't allow…
LOIS METZ: There weren't all that many civil rights.
FRED METZ: They didn't allow the leeway in those days that they do now. They told you what the rules were, and there was just no second chance. You didn't conform, you were through.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Really strict then.
FRED METZ: Yes.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you have any children?
LOIS METZ: No, we've never had children.
FRED METZ: We never have, unfortunately.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: You've been very active. Did you ever work, then?
LOIS METZ: Not really. During the years that Fred was stationed in Flagstaff, with the National Cash Register Company, he was gone most of the time.
FRED METZ: Three weeks out of every month I was gone.
LOIS METZ: And I worked at Babbitts' Drugstore, and I worked in [Gassman's?] Bookstore. And I worked in Mr. McGoth's [phonetic spelling] Indian store. I just did that summertimes for, oh, about three years. And then I decided that I'd rather have the time than the money. There wasn't all that much money in it. So that was my short business career.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: You've been very active in other things.
LOIS METZ: Well, I've done club work off and on. During the years that we lived in Flagstaff, Fred's father and mother were both invalids, and I had plenty of work at home.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: So why don't we start talking a little bit more about the Flagstaff area and what was in the downtown area, if you can remember.
FRED METZ: What was downtown?
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Yeah, what buildings there are.
FRED METZ: Well, downtown, if you'll look here on the first page under the cover of Flagstaff 1876-1976, I marked some of the old buildings, like here was Babbitts' Store, and here was a blacksmith shop, and here was the Whipple funeral parlor, and there's a vacant lot that's now the Monte Vista Hotel.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: So that's all on San Francisco Street?
FRED METZ: No, that's Aspen.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: That’s Aspen, 'cause Babbitts' is around the corner.
FRED METZ: Here's Babbitts' livery stable, where every Sunday morning I washed buggies and surreys, groomed and harnessed horses for the Sunday drivers during 1913, '14, and '15. You know the young men would hire their rigs and take their girls out driving. Sunday morning I'd come down and do all of that. Here's the Hunter Drugstore, which is the Moore Drugstore, with a fraternal hall upstairs. The bowling hall was in the basement, where during the years of 1913, '14, '15, I used to set up pins.
LOIS METZ: Incidentally, over the store that is Bledsoe’s old store, and that area there is where the first library in Flagstaff was.
FRED METZ: Yes, the first library was upstairs where Bledsoe's Men's Shop is. That was the first library.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Was there a full-time librarian?
FRED METZ: No.
LOIS METZ: Yes!
FRED METZ: Oh, yes there was! That's right.
LOIS METZ: I don't think she was a full-time librarian insofar as the library was open. I don't remember whether it was open every day or not.
FRED METZ: Then here is a building that is long since gone, directly behind Babbitts' where part of the Penney's store is, where the parking lot is, that was Babbitts' meat packing, where the cattle and hogs and sheep were killed out at a slaughterhouse east of Flagstaff, about five miles. The meat was brought in there fresh to the meat department every day, and then....
[END TAPE 1, SIDE 2; BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE 1]
FRED METZ: And it was a very, very fine grade of ham and bacon. There was an old German there in charge of....
LOIS METZ: Was that old Mr. Molenthaugh?
FRED METZ: Old Mr. Molenthaugh.
LOIS METZ: Speaking of Germans.
FRED METZ: M-O-L-E-N-T-H-A-U-G-H. And his daughter, Minnie was it? No. They only had one daughter, and she married....
LOIS METZ: Hilkins. Her name was Bertie.
FRED METZ: Bertie Molenthaugh, and she married Herb Hilkins, who was in charge of the meat department. And his son still works for Babbitts' in the meat department. HIS name is Herb Hilkin. Mr. and Mrs. Molenthaugh lived right there on the street - there's another.... auto parts that was in there. Firestone?
LOIS METZ: Western Auto, wasn't it?
FRED METZ: Western Auto. Well, that's where the Molenthaugh house was, right there.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Right down town?
FRED METZ: Yeah, and here was the packing plant, and he just walked across the street and he came to the packing plant. Here's the Methodist Church, there's the Emerson School, and there's the John Metz home, directly across the street from Emerson. When the last bell rung, I could go out my door and still go over and get in line. When the last bell rang, all of the grades, by grade, got in line - the boys in a separate line, and the girls in a separate line. The first grade marched in, then the second grade, and on down through the eighth. When the last bell started ringin', I could leave the house and go and get in my proper line and walk right in.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Is it still standing?
FRED METZ: Emerson School? Oh, no.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: No, the house.
FRED METZ: Where the house was, there is now a rock garage there. That's where it was.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: That little brick house....
FRED METZ: On the corner. That was the Milligan house next door to ours. That was the J.C. Milligan home. Mr. Milligan built three homes there. He built HIS home, he built our house, and he built the next one which was torn down, which is just a lot, and that was Dave Tate's home. Dave Tate had the nicest bar in Flagstaff. For years it was in the old Commercial Hotel. There were the three brick houses there. Before OUR folks bought the home, that was the home of Mr. Taylor, who was the first man to run the Normal School.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Superintendent?
FRED METZ: Superintendent, principal, yeah. Mr. Taylor. When he left - just before Blome came, he left - and my folks bought that home. Our original home was downtown, right across from the City Hall. I think there's a Texaco service station there now. That's where our home was for many years. We moved from there when Taylors went to Pasadena. In the early days, everybody retired and moved to Pasadena from Flagstaff.
Now, this here vacant lot right across from Babbitts' livery stable, that was a stockman's feed lot. That's where in the early days, this big lot here, and the cowboys would come to town for a two- or three-day rampage, they put their horses in there, and the horses were fed by the man in charge of Babbitts' livery stable. And sometimes they'd come in and they were so thirsty, and hadn't had a beer in so many months. Front Street then was just a series of bars and restaurants with hitching posts, and board walks out there. They'd bring their horses up there and tie 'em at the hitching posts and then they'd go in and proceed to get drunk, and sometimes those poor horses would stand there for two or three days. But the city marshal was pretty good about that, he'd come along and undo their reins from the hitching posts and ride the horse down to this stable and put 'em in there. When the cowboy sobered up, he'd have to go down there and claim his own horse and pay the storage fee, parking fee.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Who was the marshal?
FRED METZ: Oh, one of the early ones was George Hochderffer. He was one of the early marshals. There was quite a series of 'em, but the one I remember so well was Pat Hogan's uncle. What was his name?
LOIS METZ: Oh, yeah, I know who you mean.
FRED METZ: I thought I'd NEVER forget HIS name.
LOIS METZ: Wick Thompson.
FRED METZ: Wick Thompson. And he was later the first man in charge of the - he was the custodian of the first new high school up at the end of __________. What's the name of that school?
LOIS METZ: Well, it was the high school.
FRED METZ: It was the only high school.
LOIS METZ: The building is no longer there. They tore it down, dear.
FRED METZ: They did?
LOIS METZ: Yes, that's a parking lot now. The original high school is not there. It's very close to the site now.
FRED METZ: Well, anyway, after he retired as constable or marshal, he was custodian of that building for many years.
LOIS METZ: There was a man.... Wasn't he a relative… Rube Neill that was marshal _____.
FRED METZ: Rube Neill was marshal.
LOIS METZ: And then Rube went to....
FRED METZ: Winslow as city marshal.
LOIS METZ: But this.... The gal that called you the other day - Rudd. Wasn't Mr. Rudd city marshal?
FRED METZ: That's right! Mr. Rudd. He was another one of the little cattlemen that lost his cattle outfit, like many of 'em did, and HE was city marshal for awhile, Bill Rudd, William Rudd. And then HE went to Winslow. They offered him more money, and he went down there.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Was Winslow at the time comparable in size to Flagstaff?
FRED METZ: Lots bigger. It was a division point on the railroad, and all those big train crews coming in there and changing. It had three times the business in Winslow as Flagstaff. When we first moved there, Flagstaff was only about 2,000 population. But of course Winslow is just a wide place in the road now, since the train.... When that Harvey House ran there, that was the finest Harvey House in the entire system when they built that new Harvey House at Winslow. It was quite a common thing; we'd drive down there on a Sunday afternoon to have dinner at that Harvey House. And the next Sunday, we'd drive. They'd have a BEAUTIFUL Harvey House and dining room in Williams. We'd drive to Williams on a Sunday afternoon. They were all dirt roads in those days, it'd take you a couple of hours to drive down there, it's some twenty-five miles or so. We'd drive down there on a Sunday afternoon and have dinner at the Harvey House and then drive home. That was quite an experience.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: It was an all-day trip.
FRED METZ: Beautiful food, wonderful.
LOIS METZ: Nice food. In Flagstaff all they had were Chinese restaurants, and the food was okay, but it wasn't anything epicurean.
FRED METZ: Nothing exotic about it, and we got a little tiresome of it after awhile. It was quite a commonplace Sunday afternoon to see ten or twelve cars going to Williams in the afternoon to have dinner at the Harvey House. Then the trip to Winslow, which was about sixty miles (
LOIS METZ: That was a DAY’S trip.), a round trip, 120 miles, that was about a day's trip. People would leave after breakfast and saunter down there and have an early dinner and come home. Used to take about two hours and a half, to drive, one way.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Was there a road that went out by Bellmont?
FRED METZ: Oh, yes. The present road is just about where it is now.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did it go on to California?
FRED METZ: Just practically right where it is now.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: And that was fairly well traveled?
FRED METZ: Yes. In the early days, that was known as the National Old Trail. It was a dirt road. Each section was maintained by the county in which the road was. It was just a plain surfaced road. The majority of the roads in those days in Coconino County were surfaced with cinders from our cinders, you know. But that's the old, old, old main road right down through there. And that was surveyed. That road originally was surveyed by Beale, Lieutenant Beale.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh, uh-huh.
FRED METZ: He was commissioned to survey that road all the way through there, and he did. (reads from article) "There's a little-known fact, but it's a fact, that before Davis left office, he commissioned Edward Fitzgerald Beale to survey a camel trail across Arizona from Fort Defiance to the Colorado River, a route that corresponds to today's U.S. 66. And Beale brought the camels across the chain of forts from Texas to Albuquerque; from there across Arizona on his surveyed route to Fort Tejon [phonetic spelling], California. The camels were used as pack animals between Camp Verde, Arizona, and San Antonio, Texas, and between Fort Tejon and Los Angeles." Now, that Beale, there's a street in Flagstaff, Beale Street, and it's named after him. [ed. Don’t think the street is named after him, but after an early resident named “Beal”] This article here, very recently, I have the information that shows out here Fort Valley. And they say, "The valley is of course now known as FORT Valley. The beauty of that and Leroux Springs was greatly appreciated by Lieutenant E.F. Beale's party that came through in 1857." And then I have headlines, "With Camels." And attached newspaper dated June 16, 1976, "regarding Lieutenant E.F. Beale and the camel trail across Northern Arizona in 1857."
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Now, Leroux Springs is right there in Fort Valley?
FRED METZ: Right up north of there, and that was a WONDERFUL place for water. That's where a lot of Flagstaff water came from. (reading from article) "In 1881, John W. Young, a son of Brigham Young, established a timber camp near Leroux Springs on Leroux Prairie. He was supplying ties and supervised grading work for the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad, and called his camp Fort Mormon. At first the camp consisted of a collection of tents, but because of many reports of Apache raids, a stockade of double-length ties was erected, and a large log building became headquarters for the Arizona Cattle Company in 1883. And later it was changed to Fort Rickerson, following the name of the cattle company, and then later it was known as Fort Valley." Well, the terrible thing, they tore that log building down for firewood! ____________.
LOIS METZ: Yeah, it hasn't been all that long, because I can remember when I used to go out to Fort Valley a lot. The old fort was there.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: It was?
LOIS METZ: It was sort of tumbling down, but it was there.
FRED METZ: Her uncle's in charge of the experimental station at Fort Valley.
LOIS METZ: Uh-huh.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Go ahead, we'll get this on tape about your uncle and what his name was and where he came from.
LOIS METZ: Oh, yes. My uncle's name was G.A. Pierson. His name was Gustof Adolph Pierson. And my aunt hated "Gus" Pierson, so she used his initials, G.A., and we all called him Gay. I think he was probably known to his working friends as Gus Pierson, but in the family he was known as Gay. My aunt was my father's older sister - two sisters in the family. Gay came out and established that, and I can't tell you what the date was, but it would have to be.... Since my family came there in 1908, and it wasn't too long after that, I think, that he and my aunt were married, because I can remember we were there for the wedding. And then they lived out there at Fort Valley for many, many, many years after that. They had two children, and both their children were born while they were living at Fort Valley.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: That was the forestry experimental?
FRED METZ: Yeah.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Now, did he run that pretty much by himself, or did he have some help?
FRED METZ: A lot of help.
LOIS METZ: They had some help, but not so much in the wintertime. In the winter, he and one other ranger, I think, managed it. Then in the summertime, all sorts of students came out there. (
FRED METZ: Forestry students.)
LOIS METZ: They had a regular forestry course there, that the U.S. Forest Service sent all the young men out.
FRED METZ: They came from Princeton and Harvard and all over.
LOIS METZ: There was usually a dozen or more of them. I haven't been out there in many years, I don't know what there is there, but they had a lot of little cottages, and they always had a cook who fed the young men. I don't think he kept the cook during the wintertime, I think my aunt had to cook.
FRED METZ: Well, there was no one there.
LOIS METZ: But there was no one there.
FRED METZ: Most of the other forest rangers were married and had their own little houses.
LOIS METZ: And I can remember, too, they had a greenhouse there, and they had lots of experiments growing in that. But down in one end my uncle always had a lot of carnation plants, and all the winter he'd come to town with a couple of carnations for the family.
FRED METZ: Tell 'em about the experience with the colored cook when your aunt gave that big party out there _________.
LOIS METZ: He was an excellent cook, and my aunt had some sort of a do out there that was - oh, there must have been twenty-five or thirty people. So the cook went out and shot squirrels and made the most delicious chicken a la king - you know, these little patty cases?
FRED METZ: Using squirrel meat.
LOIS METZ: He used squirrel meat. Nobody every knew it, and nobody ever told 'em! (laughter)
FRED METZ: Wild squirrel abounded. And, oh, they were just....
LOIS METZ: (inaudible, same time as FM)
FRED METZ: And you know what depleted the squirrel population all in Northern Arizona. The government, up to its usual damned fool ideas, you know, they thought that the squirrel population was getting too heavy.
LOIS METZ: It was the porcupines that they were....
FRED METZ: Oh, yes, the porcupines were climbing the trees and eating this soft top in the bottom of the pine trees and causing 'em to die. So they came up with a good idea of a poisoning program to poison all the porcupines. So all across Coconino County, ALL the way over Apache, and into up around McNary, they took poison - they commissioned these forest rangers and they took this poison up, and they tied it up in these pine trees so the porcupines would get it and eat it and die. Well, the porcupines never ate a bit of it, but all the squirrels, very beautiful grey squirrels, ate it. And there was a time when you could hardly see a grey squirrel. When I was a boy in the sheep camp with my father, why, to walk from here over there to the post office, you'd encounter twenty-five, thirty beautiful grey squirrels, running, chirping, climbing the trees. They were so abundent and numerous, many, many people used to take them and kill them. They sent their skins back East to someplace - I think it was St. Louis - and had them tanned, and many of the women in Flagstaff had beautiful squirrel coats. (tape turned off and on) And the beautiful squirrel coats that so many of the women had. It was just terrible, the way.... And the porcupines just seemed to thrive on the poison. But that's the usual way the government does things.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Why don't we describe some of the people that you knew in town then.
FRED METZ: Well, there were several old characters. There's one in particular that I want to bring out.
LOIS METZ: _________.
FRED METZ: Johnny Love.
LOIS METZ: Oh, well, either one. Johnny Love ___________.
FRED METZ: Yeah. One in particular was Johnny Love, who was, in my opinion, and was thought by many people, as Flagstaff's loveable housecleaner. A gentleman, in every respect. That's what he did for a living, and there wasn't anybody in the world could clean house.... The women would go away, some of the wealthy women for the winter, and they were coming home. They'd write to Johnny and let him know that they were coming home. He had a key to their home, or the neighbor had the key, and he was allowed to go in. He even straightened out the dresser drawers and things like that. He was a hearty person. He used to walk from Flagstaff, had an uncanny sense of weather. Just before the first snow came in, he'd take out and walk to Cottonwood and Clarkdale and Camp Verde where he spent the winters, and come back in the spring, just like the robins.
There was another gentleman that was quite an early character, and his name was Schwalbe, S C H W A L B E, a German, and he was in charge of Babbitts' engine room. The engine room sat right across from the packing plant, and Babbitts' had their own light plant, you see. There was no electricity there. They had their own electrical plant, and also manufactured their own ice - they had an ice plant there. And I can remember as a boy in the afternoon goin' by, and that was just about where Babbitts' present drugstore and their men's furnishing department is, but it was in the back. And there was an entrance into the engine room. Here was this big engine going, the generating plant, and as boys we used to go down there and look in the door to see this big old generator generating electricity for Babbitts' Store. But in the evenings, Old Man Schwalbe had a chair, and he sat outside the door, tilted it back, and he had a concertina, and he'd sit back there in the chair and play all these German melodies, and us boys would gather around.
LOIS METZ: "Ach der lieber augustine." [phonetic spelling]
FRED METZ: That was one of the main ones, and it was really a time with Old Man Schwalbe. And up the street, up Railroad Avenue, just as you come under the underpass now, up on top was the big old Schwalbe home, and she had two or three rooms for rent, and ran the finest dining room in town - food, I've been told, was - I don't _________ - but she was supposed to have the finest eating place in Flagstaff. A lot of bachelors took three meals a day there with her.
LOIS METZ: Two-and-a-half. In those days, they had a lot of what they called boarding houses.
FRED METZ: Yeah, there were about four in Flagstaff, four boarding houses.
LOIS METZ: You just went there and ate your meals. Sometimes there were rooms available too. But I can remember my grandmother would travel - my grandfather always sort of looked forward to eating around these various boarding houses for a change.
FRED METZ: I look here at the list on the back here of the mayors in Flagstaff since 1894, which I knew fifty-four of 'em personally. Harold Sykes here, of 1946, was my brother-in-law. He married Mrs. Metz's sister. His father was famous, Stanley Sykes, the brother of Godfrey Sykes. In the early days they had cattle down on the Little Colorado River. I want to tell you about one of the last big fights with the Indians down there. Involved in this fight was Godfrey Sykes, Stanley Sykes, Bill Roden, Dan Hogan, Walter Durham, and that was it. How this fight originated, there was a bunch of renegade Indians in that country, running around down there. Billy Roden had a cattle ranch down on the Little Colorado River just about where.... What's the falls there?
LOIS METZ: Grand Falls?
FRED METZ: Grand Falls, right in that. Roden had headquarters there, and the Sykes brothers had. Well, Billy Roden came to town one day and left this cowboy there in charge of the place, and when he came back, the cowboy was killed and a bunch of the cattle there had been driven out. So he came into town and that's who he got, he got Stanley Sykes, and he go to the ranch. Gilbert Sykes and Billy Roden. He got Dan Hogan and Walter Durham, and they went in pursuit of 'em. There were twelve Indians, and there was quite a battle. Billy Roden was wounded twice, not severely. And the other man, Dan Hogan, was wounded. But they eliminated the twelve Indians - they killed all twelve of 'em. And that was about the last Indian fight. That occurred, as close as I can tell, around '85 - 1885 or 1886, from what I.... And Mr. Sykes', Stanley Sykes, told us about it, because you see, his son, Harold Sykes, who married Lois' sister, and we were, of course, very close to the family, and he related some of it to me. But that was quite a fight. It extended over several miles of pursuit, finally ended up from down there at Grand Falls, and ended up right there where Wynona is, where the old pass is, about fourteen miles. In the cedars, that's where they killed all the Indians, finished 'em off, this bunch of renegades, about twelve.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you want to go ahead and read your letter?
FRED METZ: Yes. I have a letter here I received from a very dear friend who was an old, old-time resident. She was born in Flagstaff, and I was so pleased with this Flagstaff 1876-1976, that I bought two or three copies for friends, and I mailed one to Thelma Campbell [Thomas] who lives now in Long Beach. And here's the letter I received from her the other day. She says, "Dear Fred and Lois, I certainly am enjoying Flagstaff 1876-1976. Thank you for sending it to me. In the July 1976 Arizona Highways, I read 'Flagstaff, One Century Old.' I enjoyed it, but felt that Al Doyle should be mentioned in every history of Flagstaff. I remember my father saying, 'Old Man Doyle came before the railroads.' So I'm really glad to see he is mentioned in the centennial celebration book. I can remember how I was impressed when Al Doyle in a buckboard would pass our house with Zane Grey, on their way to hunt bear in the San Francisco Peaks area. I've always thought Old Man Doyle was responsible for the foundation for many of Zane Grey's novels - certainly he was the only one I knew who had the knowledge of historical facts in a great number of Zane's books, like the book you have, Arizona's Dark and Bloody War. He was the one who passed these tales. I would like to see what the Flagstaff Arizona Historical Society has on Mr. Doyle. I only saw Mrs. Doyle two or three times. She always wore a small white apron, and her house was SO clean I was uncomfortable. We lived next to them, and next to Aunt Vaudy, and across from Miss Bullard. Then the house was moved, the one Elmer Jackson lived in across from the Catholic school. The little house is on the picture at the top of page 28, across from Miss Bullard, and next to Al Doyle. This is the one where we lived when the picture was taken of Gaston tying my shoe. Some of the buildings on Aspen Street 1908 are familiar. Some of them I'm glad you marked for me. I don't remember the Hochderffers, but there is Johnny Love. He used to walk from Flagstaff to Phoenix. And when he cleaned OUR houses, they really were clean. I wondered how the Greenlaws got the land east of town - now I know, they homesteaded it. We had so much fun out there. On page 9, the Robisons lived there for years." That's a house that I asked her a question about. "Marjory was the strangest child. She never came outside except to go to school. All the time we had the tennis courts, she never came out to play. Then the Sanfords owned the house. May Walker, who used to live next door to the Pollocks, and she was Tom Pollock's secretary for many years, and she married Al Sanford. On page 11, River de Flag. Remember how we used to go down there on our sleds? On page 22, Mrs. Doyle isn't wearing her white apron.” That's the picture taken of her with Bertha Kennedy on the logging truck in there. “I've been away so long, I forgot about the Hogans and the Camerons. Dr. Miller: When it was time for me to be born, Dr. Miller was out feeding his horse, they couldn't find him. I thank heavens for Nana Yost." That was Howard Yost's mother.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh, evidently was a midwife.
FRED METZ: Yeah. "I don't remember the building on page 36, but Mr. Sykes was such a brilliant man. Is it possible to get a copy of his book?" That's this one here, The Westerly Trend. "I think we should have a book about Al Doyle. I think that Fred Metz should be put in writing for the historical society about his early days at Meteor Crater. I'll probably think of a dozen other things to write, but then I could go on and on. Hope you can read this. With love to Lois and Fred - Thelma."
LOIS METZ: Well, her name was “Thomas.”
[END TAPE 2, SIDE 1; BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE 2]
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Okay, you were talking about the Campbells. The mother was a Lockett?
FRED METZ: Yeah, Thelma Campbell's mother was a Lockett. And there were three Campbell brothers in Flagstaff [who] had sheep. There was Colin Campbell. He lived at Ash Fork in the Harvey House. There was Hugh Campbell, whose house is shown here on the picture right next to the Camerons'. And then there was William H. Campbell, Thelma's father. They had the most beautiful home in Flagstaff. Mrs. Campbell, bless her dear heart, she was my Sunday school teacher, and she also, through her generosity, paid every month, contributed the largest portion of the Presbyterian minister's salary for years, so we could have a minister. And the minister that was there that was such a wonderful man as I was a boy was Mr. Clark, who later went out, was a missionary on the Indian reservation. A wonderful man, a wonderful preacher. But Mrs. Campbell, due to her generosity, was the reason that the Presbyterian Church existed as long as it did. It finally expired, and then they went in and had the one church, the Federated Church up there, across the street west of the Emerson School, and catty-corner from the Milligan house, and practically catty-corner from our house, 'cause we lived right next door to Milligans. So that's where I went to church many years at the Federated Church, after the Presbyterian Church closed. They couldn't support the two of 'em.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh, uh-huh, so they just put together.
FRED METZ: Just one.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Can you think of anyone else that you'd particularly like to talk about at this point, of the people in town?
FRED METZ: Oh, yes. One fine old gentleman in the early days was Fred Breen, the editor of the Coconino Sun, originated the Coconino Sun. He was one of Flagstaff's LEADING citizens, in my opinion: a very progressive man, a very knowledgeable man. When the original Hunter Drugstore sold out, he bought the Hunter Drugstore and put a druggist in there to run it. And then it was known for many years as the Breen Drug. And then he sold a partnership to Mr. Lewis, and it was known as the Breen-Lewis Drugstore. And then Lewis bought it out. First it was the Hunter Drugstore, and then the second owner was the Breen Drugstore, and then the third was the Breen-Lewis Drugstore. Then the fourth owner was the Lewis Drugstore, and now it's the fifth, the Moore Drugstore. Fred Moore still owns the controlling interest in it, lives down out of Mesa.
There's another family that I would like to talk about, who were close personal friends of my mother and father. They came there after the Hermans moved away and gave up their apartment store. The Nackards moved in and opened their own store. It was known as Nackard's New York Store. It was right down there on the corner across from that bar that's there on the corner. I forget what's in there now, but Mr. and Mrs. K.J. Nackard were very, very, very close friends of my mother and father's. They later then opened another store, built a store, right next door to William Switzer's hardware store, right south. They built that building in there. They moved their store down there then.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: It's where Fine's, I believe, is.
FRED METZ: Yes, Fine, that's right. That was a real family, wonderful citizens.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you know… did he have an accident during the big snow when he was getting snow off the roof? Did you hear anything about it?
FRED METZ: I don't know about that.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: I heard it from one other person, and I was wondering if anyone else had heard that he fell off the roof or something.
FRED METZ: I'm not familiar with that. It may have happened, but it may have been the time when I was gone. Oh, in the BIG snow, I was there, because this picture here showing me shoveling, I was shoveling in there SOME place.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: I was thinking, it must have been later, because the person telling that came in the twenties. So it must have been in the thirties.
LOIS METZ: Yes, there WAS a terrific snowstorm, wasn't it about '38 or '39, somewhere along in there?
FRED METZ: There was a big one in '48. Forty-eight and '49 was a big one. They had a total of 22.2 [inches] in December, and 104.8 [inches] in January.
LOIS METZ: Well, we weren't there.
FRED METZ: That's what I said, we were gone many years.
LOIS METZ: There was another storm, it had to be in the late thirties, or even the not-so-late thirties, because I was working downtown at Gassman's Gift Shop, Bookshop. Oh, there were a LOT of people caught in town. It just came on overnight, and all these people who were in Flagstaff.... (microphone scraped, obscuring comment) I can remember that first day they cleared the sidewalks, you know, about so. I can remember there was a car over in front - the bank building was still over there on the corner of Aspen, and was that Leroux?
FRED METZ: Yeah, it's where the five-and-ten-cent store was.
LOIS METZ: Yeah, it's where Sprouse-Reitz is now. There was a car that had been left there that night, and it was still there in the spring. They never more than just cleared a pathway down through the middle of the street, and that car was still there. I can remember all these people stuck in town. We sold out all our games, all our playing cards, all our magazines, and any book that was not a technical book. We were just cleaned out. And that was right around Christmastime. By the time we got ready to take our inventory, we didn't really have a lot much work to do, because the place had been cleaned out.
FRED METZ: Isn't that the one I was snowed-in, in Prescott?
LOIS METZ: I think so. We always had a joke about this: While Fred was traveling, he never got snowed-in, he always got snowed-out, and I had to shovel the sidewalk. So kidding me, but it turned out to be bitterly true, Fred took me down to try these snow shovels out at Bill Switzer's. He said he wanted to fit the snow shovel to me, 'cause I was the one that used it. It turned out, by gosh, I WAS the one who used it! (laughter)
KRISTINE PRENNACE: While we're on kind of this area, do you remember any large fires in Flagstaff?
LOIS METZ: I don't remember any. I remember A big fire. It was over, hm, vicinity of the light plant. I don't remember what burned, but there were a lot of things burned, 'cause we got up and went to that one. But the first year that we were married, there were MANY thunder and lightening storms that summer. And what we did for amusement was to go to fires. It seemed like there was at least ONE big fire every week. We didn't have the money to go to the movies, so we went to the fires.
FRED METZ: We went to fires instead.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Now, the fire department wasn't very large then, was it?
FRED METZ: Oh, no, they were all volunteers, they had one truck. But they did a marvelous job, they did a marvelous job.
LOIS METZ: There was a fire not far from our house, and it happened one Sunday afternoon. So we went to the fire. And of course everybody was trying to help save things. The front porch - it was built on a slope - and the front porch was about four feet above the ground, up from the level of the ground.
FRED METZ: You came up the stairs onto the front porch.
LOIS METZ: And all these enthusiastic helpers pushed an upright piano out on the front porch and over the edge, and it landed flat on its back.
FRED METZ: Went through the rail, just broke into a thousand pieces.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh, dear!
FRED METZ: Everybody was rushin' in, grabbin' a chair or something, and taking it out on the lawn and saving it. Three or four of 'em got behind the piano, and they just went right out, and pushed it right through the rail and it dumped over and smashed - dropped four feet and just broke wide open.
LOIS METZ: I think probably it would have been so much better to leave it in there and let it burn so they could collect the insurance on it.
FRED METZ: Yeah, this way there was no insurance.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh! So you do remember a lot of the fires.
LOIS METZ: Yes, there were a lot of fires. I'm trying to think, what was it? There was something big. There was about a block burned. We went down, it happened around four o'clock in the morning, and it was.... I can remember that we thought that the old Tupanky [phonetic spelling] house was going to go. But it was over back of that.
FRED METZ: Close to the college.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: What about any flooding?
FRED METZ: Oh, yes, that was a normal procedure, every spring River de Flag would come down. (microphone scraped, obscuring comment) All the homes along there kept sandbags, had to pile sandbags up on the edge of River de Flag, the full length as it came through town, all the way down 'til it went under the Santa Fe Railroad tracks. And it always flooded the south part of town. Every year they'd have to build these sandbags up, oh, three feet high.
LOIS METZ: Well, I can remember it coming into the schoolyard there at the Emerson School. I don't think it ever went into the basement, because it's quite a slope there, you know, down to the river. But it used to come right up. Scared 'em to death, even if it didn't come in.
FRED METZ: See, the river was right along the east boundary of the school. There was a flood EVERY year. They'd have a cloudburst up on the Peaks, you know, WHAM! about thirty minutes, here it was, right down through the middle of town.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Yeah, really a lot then. What about some dry years then - just the opposite?
FRED METZ: Yes, many summers forest fires around town would be terrible. People from town volunteered to go out to fight the fires to keep it from getting into town. They didn't have near the efficient methods that they have now of fighting it. There weren't the people available that there are now.
LOIS METZ: The town didn't cover as much territory, by any means, as it does now.
FRED METZ: Usually they just burned themselves out.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Well, what did you do for city water supply then?
FRED METZ: We had this little reservoir. Of course the original reservoir was the one up at the Old Town Spring. But then the Santa Fe Railroad had a great interest in producing an adequate water supply, because that's where all their trains watered there, you see.
LOIS METZ: Steam engines had to have water.
FRED METZ: You see, they built the first city reservoir, which is out right in the vicinity as you're going toward the canyon out there, the old reservoir, in the vicinity where the old country club is. And then it shows the picture here, the construction of the NEW city reservoir. And that was the bonds and everything, the bigger part of the bonds on that were bought by the Santa Fe Railroad, because of the town progressed, didn't have enough....
LOIS METZ: Well, originally, ALL the water that was in the reservoir came from the springs on the Peaks.
FRED METZ: Yeah, it came down.
LOIS METZ: And the water in Flagstaff was absolutely wonderful. It was so pure it didn't need to be treated at all. And it was so pure that they used it in batteries, instead of distilled water. They just used tap water any place that you use distilled water.
FRED METZ: In 1926, there's the construction of the second one. Of course since then, I understand, I've been gone, you see, they've developed, the great part is out around Lake Mary, and then up on....
LOIS METZ: Woody Springs.
FRED METZ: Woody Springs was taken over by the City, and water developed up there. I know at the time my brother-in-law was mayor, he had a great deal to do with the developing of the water, and that was during 1946.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Was that when Lake Mary started?
FRED METZ: Yeah, that was thirty-one years ago.
LOIS METZ: But of course Lake Mary's been there a long, long time, but originally it was never intended for a Flagstaff water supply.
FRED METZ: No, it was only used in later years.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: They used it for the mill, didn't they?
FRED METZ: Well, no. I don't know what it was used for to be very frank. Might have been. But there's no pipeline from there into the mill.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh. Okay, I think what might have happened was that they THOUGHT they could use it, and then they realized how many times it would have to be pumped before it got up here, so they had to abandon it.
FRED METZ: I think that's right. It was never used, I'm sure of it.
LOIS METZ: Because the dam that was across there that formed the lake was not all that big a project. So probably they weren't out all that much.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: They had a railroad, didn't they?
FRED METZ: Arizona Lumber and Timber? Yeah. I worked on it. That went out to the logging camp and picked up the logs and brought home. Each night we brought home about twenty-four cars of logs. Put 'em right along side, and they dumped 'em into the mill pond where the logs were soaked for several days to get the dirt and rock and stuff out of 'em, so when they were ready to take 'em up the incline into the saw, that a lot of the dirt was out of 'em, so it didn't knock the teeth out of the saw. That was the reason. And it was an easy way to push the logs over and get 'em to where the contraption pulled the logs up to the second floor where the mill was, where the sawyers were.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: We talked… well, we really havn’t talked about the social life of the community. You mentioned before that you were involved in the Women's Club.
LOIS METZ: Yes, I don't remember when the Women's Club was started, because when we went back there in the early thirties, it was going. I remember I joined, and about then was when they decided that they really needed a building of their own, and they put their shoulder to the wheel and built the building that eventually - or not so eventually, either - shortly after they took it over they found out that they weren't going to be able to support it. So the library came in, and they just kept one small section to use as the Women's Club. But they made the money any way they could, and I remember one way they could, was to feed the Rotary Club luncheons once a week. Before the year was out, it was awfully hard to get volunteers. (laughter) And I'm not sure that the Rotary wasn't pretty tired of meatloaf! (laughter)
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Well, we've… that was part of the social life. Do you remember anything else?
FRED METZ: Yes. In the early days, the greatest part of the social life revolved around the fraternal organizations. There was a Masonic Lodge, the Oddfellows and the Rebekahs. There was the Elks. Until they got the separate halls, they all met upstairs over the Hunter Drugstore. That was the lodge hall. Each lodge used it one night a week. That, and the social events of the churches - that's where the activity was, the lodges and the churches. The churches had potluck dinners all the time. The lodges had dinners. The Rebekah women, the branch of the Oddfellows, and the Eastern Star, the branch of the Masonic Lodge. That's where ____________, it was in people's homes. There was all kinds of parties in the wintertime, sleigh rides and taffy pulls. That was a great popular sport.
LOIS METZ: For the young.
FRED METZ: Yeah, they'd go out on a sleigh ride and come home and drink hot chocolate and then pull taffy all evening, 'til about eight o'clock or 8:30. You had to be home by nine.
LOIS METZ: But apropos, the social life at the fraternal organizations, when I was married, my grandmother said, "Lois, I have a piece of advice for you. Don't join the Eastern Star. All they do is wash dishes for the Masons. You'll be eligible to go to anything that there is up there, because your husband IS a Mason, and you won't be involved in the dish washing."
FRED METZ: So she never joined the Eastern Star.
LOIS METZ: So I never joined the Eastern Star.
FRED METZ: Which was smart.
LOIS METZ: There was another thing that my grandmother told me that stood me in good stead, and I suppose it would be true in any small community. She said, "Don't ever say anything about anybody until you've lived here long enough to know who's related to who."
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Right! There were a lot of people interrelated.
FRED METZ: A lot of 'em, that's true.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Oh! there's something else I forgot to ask you. Do you remember any of the big epidemics or bad illnesses that affected the town?
LOIS METZ: Well, of course the flu epidemic was there, but I wasn't, and neither was Fred, he was in the service.
FRED METZ: I was in the Navy then.
LOIS METZ: I only know - we were living on a ranch. That was when we were living on the ranch out in Peoria. We weren't that involved. We had the flu in the family. And later we moved to Phoenix after the epidemic had partially subsided. It seems to me that it came along in November, October-November, in 1918. And we moved to Phoenix in January. I had the flu then, the very tail end of it. Of course, by the time we got there, the crest of it had passed, and I can remember my father going in - he had his office in the Adams Hotel in Phoenix, and he went in by train every day. They had to wear these little face masks. Everybody had a little mask so you wouldn't breathe any germs.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: How did you feel when you had it?
LOIS METZ: TERRIBLE! You know, you ached all over. Well, you were just so weak. You felt just like you do with any kind of flu that you have now, only worse - having it in spades, really.
FRED METZ: I think the town that suffered the worst in Northern Arizona was Williams - the greatest number of deaths. (microphone scraped, obscuring comment) due to the flu epidemic.
LOIS METZ: One of my friends was a teacher at the school (microphone scraped, obscuring comment) [in Williams?] at that time, and she said there were only a half a dozen of 'em still on their feet. The schoolhouse was full, any place that they could find to place cots. So there were people that could be looked after en masse, rather than just going from house to house. Of course, I think by moving the victims out, perhaps the rest of the family would escape it - not necessarily so.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Yeah, that was a bad thing.
FRED METZ: Oh, it was terrible, very.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Do you remember much about city government in Flag?
FRED METZ: Not a great deal. City council form of government. There was always factions fighting. The majority of people sought the office for their own benefit, or the benefit of the company they were working for. Just like it is today, typical.
LOIS METZ: I was going to say its not all that different from today.
FRED METZ: No, no different today.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Do you remember what Flagstaff's relationship was to the rest of Arizona?
FRED METZ: It was a great place for people from Phoenix to come for the summer. Many, many Phoenix families had summer homes there. There are two places: there was Prescott area, and Flagstaff. Of course Flagstaff was the gateway to the Indian reservation during the summer when the Indian activities were around, Indian dances. I can't recall just what year it was that Flagstaff got to be a tourist center, but I would say it was in the early twenties, wouldn't you, when it became known? It wasn't until good roads were developed, because people wouldn't fight the roads, driving.
LOIS METZ: It used to be two days to go to Phoenix. Drove like crazy and got to Prescott the first night, and you drove like crazy and got to Phoenix in time for dinner the second night.
FRED METZ: Two days, full trip.
LOIS METZ: Of course the roads were NOT paved.
FRED METZ: You went to Ash Fork, and then you went south to Prescott. Then you left Prescott and went down through Dewey and Mayer, Humboldt, down through Bumblebee in the early days, through Cordes - not Cordes Junction, but through Cordes - right on down.
LOIS METZ: It was in the middle twenties that they developed the White Spar Road into Prescott, so that you didn't come over by Dewey and Humboldt, and that cut some time off. And then eventually that road was paved. At first it was not a paved road, it was just a gravel road. When the road was paved, then you began to be able to make it in a day. And eventually, all of the old-timers drove so hard then, would roll over in their graves, if they knew you could make it in two hours now.
FRED METZ: I can remember leaving Ash Fork, going to Prescott in the spring or in the winter and you'd come across that big valley there, (
LOIS METZ: Chino.)
FRED METZ: Chino Valley. I've seen as many as fifteen roads side-by-side. There was no paving, come down there, it had been raining, and here was your car, getting bogged down. They steered their car to the closest big clump of grass so they wouldn't sink in. And then you'd see another clump, and you'd gun it and drive over to THAT. So there was maybe fifteen or twenty roads there, until spring came and they got a chance to....
LOIS METZ: Things got dried out.
FRED METZ: Oh, it was something! It was.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Was there a large police department in Flagstaff?
FRED METZ: No. They only had a night marshal and a day marshal for years - that's all they had. And they could handle it without any problem because the majority of people had some respect for the law, which they don't have anymore. Kids were off the street at nine o'clock, and I mean off the street! because if they didn't, the marshal would call the parents up and tell 'em to come get 'em, and they came and got 'em. They weren't roaming the streets. Nine o'clock was the curfew. I can still remember when the curfew…
LOIS METZ: Yeah, they used to have a curfew. The whistle blew at nine o'clock.
FRED METZ: And that was it! you'd better get home! And they did. They were all off the streets.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did he have a lot of trouble with Front Street, that area?
FRED METZ: The heavy drinking was down in there. But still they had a respect for the law. If they had any trouble, he just called the sheriff's office where it is now, you know, and they could have a couple of deputies down there in a hurry, but very seldom did they ever have to resort to that. People weren't raising hell like they do now. A person got drunk, very few of 'em got unruly. What they'd do if they got drunk, some of their friends would take 'em home, take 'em over to the hotel, the Weatherford or the Commercial, and put 'em to bed. The marshal would tell 'em, and that's what they'd do. It was entirely different.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: You told me before about the "barn cure." Maybe this might be the time to bring that up.
FRED METZ: Yeah. Well, this was an episode that happened. I was familiar, my father told me about it when I was about ten, twelve years old. I saw this man walking down the street one day when we were downtown and I asked my father what was wrong, he walked so peculiarly. Father said, "Well, that fellah got the barn cure here about two years ago, and I'll tell you later on in life about it." Well, about two years later when I was fourteen, I saw the man again, and I asked my father, "What's this barn cure?" "Well," he said, "it's the finest thing I know to cure a rape that has ever existed. This is what they did to that man, and that's why it sticks in the minds of anybody who has funny ideas." He said this man had raped this little girl, she was about thirteen. He was pursued by the sheriff's office there in town, and they caught him. They just take him to an old barn, an old shed, not a big one, and they sink a post down in the middle of the barn. The barn was about maybe ten by twelve feet, just an old shed. They sink this four-inch pole, or an old cedar post down in there, just high enough that he could straddle it. Then they would take his testicles and make him straddle it, and they'd take his testicles and hold them out, and they take a big staple and behind the testicles, they stapled him right to the top of this post. And then they pile brush around it and they hand him a sharp knife, they open the door, and they set the brush afire. Now, it's up to him. He'll either castrate himself and come out through the door, or he'll perish in the flames. This man elected to castrate himself, which he did, and they took him to a doctor right there and had him treated so he wouldn't bleed to death. But that's the barn cure, and that's what they should have today. If we had the barn cure today, we wouldn't have any more rape, because there isn't anything more impressive on a young man at the age of fourteen, to have that explicitly described to you. Don't you think I'm right?
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Pretty gruesome.
FRED METZ: There is nothing gruesome about it! Think of the poor girls! What THEY go through. I think that's the way they should be treated today. In fact, if I had anything to do with it, ANYBODY that raped would be castrated the next day. They wouldn't wait for a trial, they'd castrate him right then and there, and put a stop to it.
[END TAPE 2, SIDE 2; BEGIN TAPE 3, SIDE 1]
KRISTINE PRENNACE: There's another historical event that I wanted to ask you about, if you recollect it. Do you remember Prohibition?
FRED METZ: Yes. Flagstaff had, as I told you, down on Front Street, or Railroad Avenue, a very large number of bars. Practically there was a bar and then a Chinese restaurant. Most of the drinking was confined to that area. There were two or three outstanding bars, very nice places, where the gentlemen of the city did their drinking. In those days, ALL the bars had the free lunch, which is unknown of. We could walk in there… and my father had taken me in, and here'd be this, down at the end of the bar here'd be at noon, starting about eleven o'clock, here would be hams and roast beef, and pig knuckles and pickled eggs, and bread to make sandwiches. The ham was sliced, the beef was sliced. All kinds of pickles and things. Sauerkraut, hot dogs - you just went in and bought yourself a five-cent beer, went down there and make you a sandwich and stood there and ate it, whatever you wanted; free lunch. They were really, really wonderful.
LOIS METZ: That wasn't Prohibition.
FRED METZ: When Prohibition came along, ____ all of that. There was an awful lot of bootlegging around Flagstaff, an awful lot of whiskey made out in the hills, and some names I won't mention, because they're not there, made a lot of money making illicit whiskey. Some of their children still live in the town, and I wouldn't mention any names for that reason, 'cause they had nothing to do with it. But there was a great deal of bootlegging. When Arizona first went dry, New Mexico was wet, and they brought whiskey in from New Mexico. California was still dry, and I remember an incident of a couple of friends of mine, they were older acquaintances, not friends, who had quite a run between Flagstaff and Needles. They'd buy their whiskey and bring it over into Flagstaff. Some of the roundabout ways, there was one road that they would - just around Bellemont they could go north on a road there about Bellemont that'd bring 'em in around Fort Valley, and then come into Flagstaff from the north. And of course the sheriff's posse was never looking for them there. They was always looking for the whiskey to be brought in on the road from California or from New Mexico. These fellahs got by with that for quite a long time. Well, finally somebody wised the sheriff's office up, so the sheriff's office one night laid for these fellahs. Well, they had this great big ol' Studebaker touring car just loaded to the gunnels with cases of whiskey. But they were coming, and a friend of theirs heard that the sheriff's office was laying in wait for them, so he went out to warn them. He passed the sheriff's posse that was hidden, went way on past several miles, and was able to stop 'em and tell 'em that the sheriff was laying for 'em down the road.
So there was a spot there, just the other side of Bellemont a little ways before they turned up. They thought they would unload the whiskey and then drive right in and let the sheriff stop 'em. Well, they did, and off the road about fifty feet was what appeared then to be this big ol' log laying there on the ground. Well, all that it was, it was a bright moonlight night, and the moon was casting the shadow of an upright tree that threw the shadow on the ground 'til it looked like a great big ol' log. So they go over and unload all of these cases of whiskey, pushed it up against what they thought was a log, came back to the car and drove, and the sheriff stopped 'em, and they didn't have a thing, see. So they thought the next morning they'd go out and retrieve the liquor, which they did. And when they got out there, to where it was, here were all these cases of whiskey, piled right out there in this open flat, with nothing around it! No one had seen it, because there wasn't much traffic, you see, on the road, but they thought it was hidden up against a log, and there was nothing there.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: I can't remember, were you in Flagstaff during the Depression?
FRED METZ: No. I was in '31. I came up and took over that territory for the National Cash Register Company in '31, and I was there 'til '41, ten years.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Do you remember from listening to other people talk, how the Depression had affected Flagstaff?
FRED METZ: I think that Flagstaff was one of the least hurt cities in the United States, for several reasons. People were more or less thrifty - more thrifty in those days than they are now. Of course, there were some people that suffered. Some of the businesses closed, but the county took care of a great many. But I would say as a whole, that Flagstaff suffered LESS during the Depression than any other town in the United States. The mills closed, and there were some people there, of course, that lost their job, but people were thrifty in those days, they didn't rely on welfare. Prit near everybody had savings. They had their money put away into savings, so when the Depression came along, they lived off of their savings. Not like now, they didn't run to welfare.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: World War II?
FRED METZ: I was in San Francisco.
LOIS METZ: I was. One of the things that I do remember, is the way that Flagstaff was affected when they began building the munitions depot.
FRED METZ: At Bellemont.
LOIS METZ: There wasn't anything at Bellemont, so all of these construction workers came into Flagstaff while they were getting ready for them out at Bellemont. And living right across from the school as we were, there were people living in their cars, families, living in their cars, and a lot of little children, you know, and they'd play over in the schoolyard during the day. The moms would take the blankets out and hang them on the fence.
FRED METZ: There was a plank fence all around.
LOIS METZ: And they just lived there.
FRED METZ: They lived there.
LOIS METZ: It was an awe-inspiring sight. It was really something.
FRED METZ: There's a very amusing experience that occurred about that time. There was a man that had this campground right out there on Railroad Avenue, just a block-and-a-half past the present location of the Arizona Sun on the left-hand side. His name was Brooks, Frank Brooks, a very good friend of mine. He had the little grocery store there, and had about fifteen just little one-room cabins, with two or three water pipes out in front and a couple of community toilets. Of course when these people came in there in swarms to work at the munitions depot, they immediately hired all of those at once. Well, most of 'em didn't have any money, so they came to Frank Brooks and asked him if they could have a little credit at his grocery store until they got their first pay, and he said, "Yes, you get your first pay, you must come and pay me." They get paid once a week the men told him. So the first week came by, Saturday night, and they came in to get some groceries, and he said, "Well, wouldn't you like to settle up?" They said, "We didn't get paid yet." He couldn't understand, so came the second week, and they didn't get paid, they told him. So he told 'em, "There's something wrong here, two weeks and you haven't been paid? Didn't they make some kind of a record?" All those fellahs wore bib overalls, you know. You know, the watch pocket kind. So there were three or four of 'em in there and one of 'em said, "Well, all we've got is this little slip paper tellin' about how much time we worked." He pulled it out, and it was two checks. They were so dumb and ignorant they didn't know what a check was. That's a fact!
Then another incident I heard about the same time, I was down the street one evening, and there were some weird characters that came out there with their families to build that, from all over. I saw this couple coming along, and you could tell, they all wore their overalls in boots, and they wore these railroad-type caps, and they were looking in the store there, DeVaney's Boot Store, right along there. I think James has got a boot store there now. So this woman said to the man who was her husband, "Oh, you know, I never have owned a pair of store-boughten shoes. We've got a little money now. Couldn't I go in and buy that pair of shoes there on sale? They're only two-and-a-half." "Why," he said, "sure, go in and help yourself. I just paid fifteen dollars this afternoon for a gee-tar." I stood there, liked to died laughin'. Oh, there's some weird characters came in to build that munitions depot. They brought 'em from the mountains in the South, all over.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Maybe talk about some of the other racial ethnic groups that were in town. Were there any Indian families in town?
FRED METZ: Very few. In the early days, the Indians girls were used in the summertime as maids, they came in and worked. A few families had Indian girls. It wasn't until McNary bought the Flagstaff Lumber and Timber Company that - there were two colored families in town, that's all. Then they imported all these colored lumberjacks to work at McNary and to work at the mill. And they imported all of the colored people in, and we only HAD a few colored families in town.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: How did that affect the town?
FRED METZ: Well, I don't know. I don't think it had a great deal of effect on it. Do you, Lois?
LOIS METZ: No, not too much. Back then, they had a colored school, the Dunbar School, and the kids went over there. I don't remember about high school, but I don't think that many of 'em went on as far as high school.
FRED METZ: No, most of 'em didn't.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: They had to work?
FRED METZ: There were a lot of Mexican children that went to high school, but they were just considered part of us.
LOIS METZ: Mexicans had always been there.
FRED METZ: The Mexicans had ALWAYS been there.
LOIS METZ: The Indians and the colored people would have stood out.
FRED METZ: The Indians all went to school out on the Indian School Reservation, you see, to schools out there.
LOIS METZ: I can't remember an Indian kid in school.
FRED METZ: No. Not during OUR period.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Not at all?
FRED METZ: No.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Things are different now.
LOIS METZ: Way back there, you were asking about what they did for fun, the social life. You should get him to tell you about the Fourth of July picnics.
FRED METZ: Oh, THOSE were a marvelous event. They were held out at the old reservoir site. The fraternal organizations, like the Masonic Lodge and the Elks and the Oddfellows, would furnish the main things like the barbecued meat and the beans and things, and the bread. So two or three days before the Fourth of July, they usually celebrated two days, the third and fourth. Some cattleman would donate a yearling calf, and some farmer would donate three or four hogs, or three or four farmers would each donate a hog, and two or three sheepmen would all donate a sheep, so they had this tremendous barbecue pit out there, and they would barbecue all this meat, plenty of it! So when you came out, all you had to do was to bring your knife and fork, everything else was furnished. And it was really something to go out there and see that. And I can remember as a boy, you'd start walking, or ride your bicycle out there. It was about four miles, and buggies and somebody with a big float full of canvas and straw, taking a whole bunch of people, get out there in time. There was in the morning not too much in the way of entertainment. But prit near all the lodges - or not all the lodges, but some of 'em - and individuals had kegs of beer out there on planks, and some of 'em brought their own hard liquor, some people got drunk, but very few. And then you just went up where all this beef and pork and lamb was barbecued. You could have your choice, or some of all. Old Keller's Bakery donated I don't know how many hundreds of loaves of bread. You had bread, you had beans. Of course many people didn't eat salad in those days, but some of the folks brought their own salad. Then you went over around your group, in the back of your buggy or under the shade of a pine tree. You put the canvas or blanket, and your friends would come, you'd all eat together. Then in the afternoon, startin' maybe about two o'clock, was when they'd have the bronc riding, right around in the trees, no saddle. And then there was several exhibitions of pistol shooting and tug of wars and wrestling. They'd have it out there several years, and then they used to have 'em at the old fairgrounds, which was located there about now where the university football field is. And they had all kinds of entertainment then. But the early days, it was out there at the reservoir. They'd build a platform and then in the evening, the dancing. They had an orchestra, and people would dance until midnight.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Fireworks?
FRED METZ: Yeah, they had to be awful careful with the forest __________. It was about as nice a celebration as one could ever experience.
LOIS METZ: That was DEFINITELY pre-Pow Wow.
FRED METZ: Oh, yeah, that's long before the Pow Wows were ever thought of. When the Pow Wows started, that was originally put on by a lot of the merchants in town to get a lot of people in town, and get a lot of tourists in town. It was just a money-making deal, and it still is, and it's the worst thing in the world. It's the worst thing that ever happened to Flagstaff, that Indian Pow Wow.
LOIS METZ: Well, way back when, when the Indians came in, that was their one big thing they did once a year.
FRED METZ: They came in once a year, and it took 'em a week.
LOIS METZ: They came in, in their wagons.
FRED METZ: They camped along the way. It took 'em a week to come in from the reservation with their wagon. And they had a parade and the merchants all threw in, and at the end of the parade they'd go by a place and they got a bale of hay, they got some oats, they got maybe a watermelon or two, they got some meat, the cattlemen gave the meat with a pretty good price to the town, so then all the Indians picked all of this stuff up, and then went on up to their campground in the City Park, and they had their camp up there. They cooked their meat and they had their watermelons and they had feed for their horses. It wasn't too bad in those days, but the thing got out of hand, in my opinion. There's just....
LOIS METZ: Oh, it's gotten so big, and of course it's easy for them to come in now with their ______equipment.
FRED METZ: And there's trouble. There'll be trouble every year, just as long as they have it - problems with the Indian trouble.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Was there anything out in East Flagstaff that you can remember?
FRED METZ: Nothing.
LOIS METZ: Oh, the only thing that was out there was every summer they had the Chautauqua: lectures and concerts and things out there. There was a huge round of - what was it? It was a missionary-type thing. It was religiously sponsored.
FRED METZ: Thirty days it lasted.
LOIS METZ: There was a big auditorium tent, and oh, revival meetings and so forth (
FRED METZ: Every night.). But that was where they had their chautauqua things. I think probably four things during the summer: lectures, concerts....
FRED METZ: But all the various religious people - you know, if Phoenix wanted to get out, they'd come up there and bring their tents and spread their tents.
LOIS METZ: Conference grounds.
FRED METZ: Conference grounds! That's right, it was religious conference grounds. They had a MONSTROUS big dining room, and you could pay for your meals there, and they got pretty good meals, 'cause I've eaten there a couple of times. And then they had this big tent, kinda like a church. In the morning and in the afternoon and the night, there was just CONSTANTLY church activities going on.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: And that was what the chautauqua was?
LOIS METZ: No, the chautauqua was separate. It was sponsored, I think, by these various religious organizations - I don't remember that exactly - but I remember that these various events. The chautauqua headquarters was back in the East, and they'd book these various things all across the country.
FRED METZ: Yeah.
LOIS METZ: I'm trying to think of something comparable. It was sort of like a roadshow company, where they'd be booked here, there, and yonder, and they always booked a few of 'em. At that time, the Normal School was not all that active. The Normal School did things for the Normal School, and that was that. I'm trying to think of the famous man that I heard.
FRED METZ: Well, William Jennings Bryant came through once.
LOIS METZ: Well, I didn't hear him.
FRED METZ: I did. I heard William Jennings Bryant speak.
LOIS METZ: They'd have choruses and concert-type things. During the summer there would be perhaps three events, and you bought a season ticket for it. And it would be - I can't remember where it was ever more than one performance or not. At the time I was too young to be paying too much attention to that sort of thing - I just remember going to them. That was one of the....
FRED METZ: Where the Greenlaws old home is, now that was the end, there was nothing out there at all. Nothing just from there on.
LOIS METZ: Fred said he used to hunt rabbits out there all the time.
FRED METZ: Yes, rabbits out there.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Switzer Canyon, what was that?
FRED METZ: Well, that was just a place they called Switzer Canyon.
LOIS METZ: Nothing there, nobody.
FRED METZ: No, nothing there.
LOIS METZ: But the quarry was right on the edge of it.
FRED METZ: The stone quarry, where all the red sandstone in the courthouse and various buildings, was quarried.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Do you remember a place called China Canyon at all? Is that where the high school - I mean, out towards that area?
FRED METZ: That was never China Canyon, that area out there. The Clarks had a big homestead out there and there was Clarks Pasture, to my knowledge. I used to play out there as a boy.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Yeah, I think it was in the twenties or something.
FRED METZ: That's new. That's some other name that was put on it.
LOIS METZ: Well, he's talking about Clarks Pasture, and then just a little bit beyond that, Mr. Tom Pollock had a ranch, a nice big ranch house, and a half-mile race track, because he raised race horses.
FRED METZ: That's in that area where all those homes were built in there.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: The Mountainview Estates, I think they call 'em.
LOIS METZ: Is that Mountainview Estates? It's on the left-hand side, just before you get to the Sechrist School.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Right.
FRED METZ: Tom Pollock had a beautiful place up there. That's where he kept his race horses. And he'd take his race horses down to Phoenix every fair - fair in November - and he raced 'em. He had a horse trainer that lived there, and then later Andy Matson took over the place and ran it for him, and started another dairy out there. Matsons had a dairy there.
LOIS METZ: That would be back in the twenties.
FRED METZ: Yeah. That was one of the Matsons. Mrs. Mike Purcell is the oldest Matson girl. One of Flagstaff's nicest families were the Matsons.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Now did most families just have their own cows at home?
FRED METZ: A lot of them had friends who had cows. The first dairy in Flagstaff that I can remember was Garing. They had the first Flagstaff ________. (FM and LM discuss location of diary.) It was out west. Where is the Flagstaff Dairy located? Now, that might have been the original but I just thought of that now; west Garing was the first dairy, and then Matsons had a dairy, and the Johnsons had a dairy just east of town not too far. There were three dairies which supplied.... A LOT of people went to friends who had a cow in the back yard - it was all right to have a cow - and get a bucket of milk from them.
LOIS METZ: I remember Fred's mother kept chickens.
FRED METZ: Yeah. Everybody had chickens or rabbits in the back yard. That's what you ate.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: I guess it wasn't big enough for it to bother it, really.
LOIS METZ: It didn't disturb anybody.
FRED METZ: Everybody kept 'em, and that was part of what you had to live on. You had to grow your own food, you know.
LOIS METZ: But of course, I can remember, too, when I first started housekeeping up there, the vegetables were practically nonexistent - shriveled up little beets and carrots and things. And that was one of the reasons nobody ever had salad. (tape turned off an on)
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Was this because they couldn't get 'em in from anywhere?
FRED METZ: No, they weren't available, they didn't have equipment for shipping them, for one thing.
FRED METZ: Everybody grew their own.
LOIS METZ: They grew 'em in the summertime and canned what they could. So then you just got along as best you could. Of course the canned fruits and vegetables were an ENORMOUS department of the grocery stores then. And now, they've got a few little shelves of canned things.
FRED METZ: They're frozen or fresh now.
LOIS METZ: And of course nobody ever heard of anything [frozen?].
FRED METZ: Everybody had a root cellar. Out in our back yard we had a root cellar about four feet deep, lined with ties, in boxes all around, bins about two feet square, and that was all full of fine screened sand from River de Flag, and you raised your potatoes, or like we bought all of our potatoes and cabbage and turnips and everything from Old Man Michelbach, with his place up on the Peaks. And then you brought that down, and you buried all of that in the sand, and you went down there, and you had your turnips and you had cabbage, and you had potatoes, and you had sweet potatoes. Anything like that was all buried in the sand and you just dug the sand out and brought it up and used it, 'cause you needed it. You bought fresh potatoes, but most people, because they were so expensive, they raised their own. I won't say everybody, but prit near everybody had a little garden patch.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Did you have an ice man that would deliver ice?
FRED METZ: Yes, I used to deliver ice. During my summer vacations, one of my jobs was ice delivery from Babbitts'. The only ice plant was Babbitts' ice plant there, where they made their own electricity, you know. That was a back-breaking job, all day long, lifting. You'd go to these old ice boxes and the woman would be gone, she'd just have a sign hung out there, how much she wanted: ten pounds, fifteen, or twenty five. You'd have to go open the lid and take out all the milk and stuff that she'd had in there next to a little chunk of ice. Put that, and put the new chunk in, and then break the little piece around and put back the stuff. Oh, it was one hell of a job! To deliver twenty-five pounds of ice to many places would take you a half-hour. You know, with what you had to do. They were inadequate, the damned ice pan always ran over, all over the floor. Most of 'em had 'em out on the back porch and had a hole drilled through, with a funnel and a hose there to divert the water under the house. But it was, uh…
KRISTINE PRENNACE: You got milk delivered every day (
FRED METZ: Yes.)
KRISTINE PRENNACE: eggs delivered quite often. Things like that. Didn't you shop almost every day?
FRED METZ: No. Oh, no, most people shopped once a week in those days.
LOIS METZ: Well, in those days, though, they DID shop a lot oftener, because the refrigeration was inadequate, completely.
FRED METZ: For perishables, you had… that’s right. There was no refrigeration for years and years and years. Things spoiled.
LOIS METZ: And of course in Flagstaff it was fairly brisk, and if you had a back porch where you could keep things, that helped. But you couldn't buy, like we buy now, shop twice a month, or anything like that, (
FRED METZ: You put everything in the freezer, you know.)
LOIS METZ: because you just plain didn't have the kind of storage to help keep it.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: If you kept meat for two or three days, that was it.
FRED METZ: That was it. And you see, everybody had their own chickens, and several people had turkeys, and they'd come over and come around during the season. The only time you had turkey was on Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's, and they'd come around and take your order, and they'd deliver it the day before Christmas, fresh turkeys - not frozen, there was no such a thing. And chickens, several people on the outskirts of town, some of these farmers and ranchers raised a lot of chickens, and they came in every Saturday morning, and if you were on their list, they'd come by and leave you a chicken or a dozen eggs or a pound of fresh butter, or two pounds.
LOIS METZ: There were quite a few farms up on the Peaks. Of course they weren't in operation in the winter at all, but during the summer you could get fresh vegetables.
FRED METZ: We had one woman up there on the Peaks, she and her husband, every week they brought a pound of fresh churned country butter, a couple dozen eggs, and a quart jar full of cream that was so heavy you had to spoon it out, and maybe a half-gallon or a gallon of milk, because it was so fresh. And if you wanted a chicken next week, "Bring us a chicken." And they were always a good size, three-and-a-half, four-pound fryers, you know, big ones, had some meat on 'em. But most were like my mother, she had twenty-five or thirty chickens in the back yard all the time. We didn't have to buy any chickens. We bought turkeys.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: You had your eggs every day.
FRED METZ: Yeah, we had a few eggs every day. Most of the time it was only - sometimes the chickens would take a time when they weren't laying, and then we'd have to buy eggs.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Yeah, that's the way you got your food.
FRED METZ: That's right.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: Can you think of anything else?
FRED METZ: No.
KRISTINE PRENNACE: We've covered so much.
FRED METZ: I imagine after you leave, I'll start thinking of all kinds of things, but I think that concludes it. How about you, dear?
LOIS METZ: I can't think of anything else at the moment.
[END OF INTERVIEW]